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by gauravk92 5159 days ago
I would imagine no one at valve is an expert at managing backups for hundreds of machines and keeping an appropriate level of redundancy. Valve is definitely a company that is going to focus on where it can do better then others. They probably use many outside services to handle the things they don't want to have to worry about or specialize in. Other companies will handle it better because that's their focus, Gabe definitely gets that.
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They probably use many outside services

We experimented with out-sourcing a few years ago. It was a disaster: the out-sourcing company was 'fair-to-excellent' with standard products and services.

But we're a manufacturing company. The majority of our software is specific to our industry. Suddenly the vendor is dealing with dozens of apps they've never even heard of. And - whoops - some of the guys who dealt with that stuff are laid off.

The rest of us got calls from confused techs in Austin plaintively asking what in the heck was the UmptyFratz service and who can restart it?

Long way of saying that - I imagine - some of what Valve does is industry specific and hard to out-source.