SMB. They are effectively the webmaster for a vast amount of very small business, but also Meta's ad platform ends up being one of the larger expenses for many businesses. In fact, I doubt there is a single entity on earth that has more billable B2B relationships.
I agree that spinning up a pure-play public cloud makes no sense for Meta. Its not in their ethos, moreover selling various abstractions over virtualized compute is a commodity. Why would they get in line, behind IBM and Oracle?
Given that Office 365 is being counted as 'Cloud' imagine what Meta could do with some $100/yr SMB service. On the enterprise end, they have some of the very best big data and ML infra and could do well to bundle up extra capacity sell that on a metered basis. If they had started offering managed Presto in 2015 this conversation wouldn't be happening.
Their network infra (IP space, undersea cables, edge pops etc) is also rather vast and I could see a lot of SMB to F500 customers lining up to leverage it if bundled right. If they wanted to they could write a check for CloudFlare, I checked their balance sheet. Meta Cloudflare would be a juggernaut; so powerful that I pray the FTC wouldn't allow it.
Historically Facebook has been allergic to B2B outside of selling ads. Even within it they bought and killed Atlas, effectively handing a monopoly on ad serving to Doubleclick. Now they are warming up to it, offering Workplace, Kustomer, and Oculus for enterprise. I think that the Metaverse could be a novel B2B play and so do they, calling it "The Future of Work".
tl;dr: Meta could win the cloud business because it has the people, cash, differentiated tech, and existing relationships. They could beat AWS/GCP/Azure in many segments of IT spend by packaging their assets together into a novel kind of cloud.
>If they wanted to they could write a check for CloudFlare, I checked their balance sheet. Meta Cloudflare would be a juggernaut; so powerful that I pray the FTC wouldn't allow it.
Why would there be any issue from an FTC standpoint? As far as I can tell, they're in completely separate businesses. I do agree it is a brilliant idea to Microsoft-ize the SMB relationships they already have to sell software services.
I support I feel uncomfortable about it, but maybe such a merger wouldn't raise antitrust flags. CloudFlare has an insane amount centralization. I love their services as a web user, developer, and operator, but WOW do they have a lot of power by nature of their business. I worry about a buyout by a less principled company that could do all manner of wrong with CloudFlare's assets. For example, a Meta Cloudflare could start to delay or block 1.1.1.1 DNS queries to their competition, and do so quietly and selectively. Any service that offers "Protection" ought not be part of a conglomerate.
They don't need to win, they just need to be there as another option. Every business I've worked at has been huge on wanting cloud diversity of some sort, and tons of startups act as middle men on this.
Another of the big boys offering a cloud product would guarantee it would pick up customers and give them another avenue they can plausibly hunt for competitive advantage in.
I agree that spinning up a pure-play public cloud makes no sense for Meta. Its not in their ethos, moreover selling various abstractions over virtualized compute is a commodity. Why would they get in line, behind IBM and Oracle?
Given that Office 365 is being counted as 'Cloud' imagine what Meta could do with some $100/yr SMB service. On the enterprise end, they have some of the very best big data and ML infra and could do well to bundle up extra capacity sell that on a metered basis. If they had started offering managed Presto in 2015 this conversation wouldn't be happening.
Their network infra (IP space, undersea cables, edge pops etc) is also rather vast and I could see a lot of SMB to F500 customers lining up to leverage it if bundled right. If they wanted to they could write a check for CloudFlare, I checked their balance sheet. Meta Cloudflare would be a juggernaut; so powerful that I pray the FTC wouldn't allow it.
Historically Facebook has been allergic to B2B outside of selling ads. Even within it they bought and killed Atlas, effectively handing a monopoly on ad serving to Doubleclick. Now they are warming up to it, offering Workplace, Kustomer, and Oculus for enterprise. I think that the Metaverse could be a novel B2B play and so do they, calling it "The Future of Work".
tl;dr: Meta could win the cloud business because it has the people, cash, differentiated tech, and existing relationships. They could beat AWS/GCP/Azure in many segments of IT spend by packaging their assets together into a novel kind of cloud.