| You are only repeating the arguments of run-of-the-mill management, and most people reading Kelley's blog post will be familiar with them. There's something else going on here. After all, as a business manager with a duty to make the most for your shareholders, if you really anticipated scaling your compute needs, wouldn't you invest in the cheapest way to do more computing ? If you were a board member of a trucking company, and your CEO told you "Managing trucks is a pain, always filling them with fuel and stuff, I outsourced it to another trucking company, they are only charging us 5 times our previous budget in equipment and drivers salaries. Now we can focus on what we do best, making our customers happy" you'd fire that CEO. "It's easier to hire for cloud skills that bare metal skills" is self-fulling in part, but if you are doing self-hosting correctly, it's also meaningless because you will just run largely the same software infrastructure. You can go to Dell or HP and have them deliver you a rack or more that already have the cloud software you want installed. The "it frees up organizational focus for your customer's problem" is the closest to being meaningful. Modern corporate management seems weak generally, other examples include the trend of not promoting internally and instead hiring from outside -- it's like the none of the corporations trust themselves to evaluate people themselves, and inherently feel more confident hiring someone another corporation has found valuable. "We are bad at managing our core business which has a profit margin of 10%. Therefore, we will take an essential service in support of that, outsource it to a company which is known for algorithmically detecting customer lock-in and raising prices, and is extremely difficult to leave, and will charge us 5 times as much." |