[mariusseufzer]

And there we have it: Relying on big companies sucks. It's great as long as it works. Once a system breaks thousands, or even millions, of businesses suffer. (Of course they are also beneficial and a private server can also crash at any time + I don't wanna blame Slack, but we always have to keep this in mind).

[yreg]

If a big company has million customers and the big company experiences an outage per quater, then a million businesses suffer every quater.

If a thousand small companies have thousand customers each. And these small companies experience an outage per quater, then a million businesses suffer every quater.

As the end-user-business, is it better to suffer the outage at the same time as other businesses? Is it worse?

Surely there are valid arguments against relying on big companies, but I don't think this is one of them.

[beagle3]

> If a thousand small companies have thousand customers each. And these small companies experience an outage per quater, then a million businesses suffer every quater.

Not all companies are created the same. Microsoft, Google and Facebook have had their outages, but IME much fewer than Slack.

If there are a thousand small companies, none of them have a network effect, and those that experience more outages per quarter will lose customers to those that have less outages per quarter. So they have much more incentive to improve.

Whereas network-effect beneficiaries like Facebook (and to a lesser extent, Google, Microsoft and Slack) have much less of an incentive to improve. Who else would the customers go to?