[bvanderveen]

All credibility lost here:

> Cloud computing drastically reduced the capital and time required to start a startup. In the dot-com era a decade before, starting an internet startup required purchasing racks of servers and paying system administrators to keep them running, but suddenly fully configured, maintained, and secure serves could be had for a few cents per minute — pay as you go.

> Suddenly Japan’s software developers didn’t need to explain their idea to a VC and convince them that it would sell. They could just build things and get people to start using them and start paying for them. And that’s just want they did.

Your hosting cost, whether you're on bare metal or the most opinionated git-push-your-rails-app is a tiny line item on the P/L. Rarely have I seen an instance where the pay-off period for spending, say, a month of one engineer's time (for a nice round number, say, $10k) reducing the hosting expenses is less than a year (say, $1k/mo in hosting expenses).

In just about every case you're better off spending that developer-month building a feature or delivering a contract.

So yeah, maybe cloud computing saved you, at the outside, $10-20k server parts and a rack in a colo or whatever.

TLDR with or without The Cloud, 2022 or 1999, your server costs are tiny in comparison to what you spent on payroll getting to market.

Yeesh.

[xvinci]

I think you got it wrong: Buying hardware and setting it up and keeping it running, just as described, is / was a high barrier of entry cost-wise (Not to mention the fact that people used to actually running hardware in a data center are scarce). Many (sometimes poor) people could not / would not take that bet.

With "cloud computing" (to me even before there was the word cloud around, but thats nitpicking) suddenly your only real investment needed was your own time, which to you is "free" if you can somehow make a living on the side (some people simply accept to live poor for some time, some had their family, etc.). The few Euros for a vserver (or "webspace" at the time) were doable for most if not all. Not to mention student programs, free credits to lock you down to hyperscaler X, etc. we all have nowadays.

Or comparing it to myself: I learnt programming at the age of 12 because we got a free environment alongside our ISP contract for executing PHP with a mysql database behind it. I would never have spent any money. Now I have been a professional software developer for almost 16 years which I say is thanks to that way lower barrier of entry that was created along the lines of ~ 1995 - 2005.

[habitue]

In pure dollars per minute, yes, but the primary benefit being alluded to here is a political one. A small team can use tiny discretionary funds and build a working prototype quickly. The same project is dead in the water if you have to go get buy in to allocate company compute, get multiple VP signoff on a project proposal, etc etc.

Cloud computing turned asking permission into asking forgiveness, and that's a real benefit politically.

[fyresala]

It feels like the author is talking more about self-hired indie hackers so the payroll doesn't count. But I don't know if that was really a fashion.

[quietbritishjim]

The part you've quoted is pretty clear that the cost it's referring to is maintenance cost for on-prem servers:

> ... and paying system administrators to keep them running.

That agrees with your main point, which is that employee time is the main relevant cost. (Nowadays, cloud services seen to have gotten so complex that you still need an eternity of employee time to set them up, but that's another matter.)

[noobermin]

The one thing I might add (don't know for sure, just guessing) is the cost of things might look different in Japan vs. here in the US. May be the cloud made a serious differential in the upfront cost as hardware is more expensive there, I don't know.

[astrange]

Buying anything in Japan (even an MS Office license) is at least more likely to require going out drinking with salespeople rather than just visiting a website.