For years Dell would let it "leak" out to the press that they were looking at supporting AMD chips. It would happen every year like clockwork. Then after a month you'd hear that Dell and Intel had come up with a new deal to remain Intel exclusive.

Hasn't Dell offered AMD chips for a long time? Dell currently sells AMD-based laptops, and was doing so back in 2008 as well.

For example, this Ryzen laptop: http://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/new-inspiron-15-...

Before then – in the 90s both Intel and Microsoft used a lot of backroom deals to keep big vendors exclusive. If memory serves it took the Opteron’s crushing performance advantage before we started seeing that break for Intel servers; Linux users for years were stuck paying for OEM Windows installs which were never used.

Yes, but I've been around the industry a while. I specifically remember this happening during the late 90s and just in to the 2000s.

It was occurring at a time when AMD was fairly firmly beating Intel on a straight $/performance basis (~K6 era). If Dell had started shipping AMD based systems back then it could have been a big game changer.

The general narrative around the tech press at the time was that Intel knew this and were desperate to keep Dell as Intel exclusive.

These are probably to prevent action from the FTC.

I think they are talking about when Dell made serious profits in PCs.

Really playing these companies against each other would mean dynamically balancing your services across the providers based on pricing

I work for a large CDN. Lots of big customers do this, they shift their traffic around between different CDNs based on a lot of metrics, including price and performance.

I also work for a CDN.

Some of our stuff dynamically utilizes other CDNs. A customer might go try and test deploy something and we might use (AWS or whatever) to do it.

It's CDNs all the way down.

I work for a company people use to build CDNs. Just another turtle. :D

like physical infrastructure or something else? a bit curious (having many neteng friends at many, many CDNs)

I have similar friends!

We the whole stack for most people, but also run our software on "private cdns" for some. We primarily target devs: https://fly.io

Adding my turtle as a CDN employee ;-)

We license software[1] to ISPs/MSPs who then use it to "OEM" Kubernetes clusters to CDN providers.

We should rename our product "Infinite Regress" ;-)

[1] https://gravitational.com/telekube/

I wonder how many of the people in this chain are sitting next to me.....

I've love to see some open source tools that manage this automagically for me. :-)

It would also require an architecture that supports multiple interfaces. Totally doable (the facade pattern comes to mind) but you'd want to calculate the TCO to see it works out financially.

Shameless plug: we have an open source tool you can build stuff like this on. It'll run any logic you can implement in JavaScript, we have people doing things like "send traffic to backend with lowest latency" already, it'd be pretty easy to pull in some API data to pick based on cost.

https://github.com/superfly/fly

Did this a lot with payment processors. Literally had application router settings that could route based on % or switch off once a certain monthly or yearly amount was hit. Configs could be updated in real time.

If it's a final decision, then most of the cost is in the future, far beyond the reach of the initial quotes.

I've seen too many companies turn extractive (including, of course, that same Microsoft) to ever use the words "final" next to "platform decision".