> When Amazon got into the cloud business, they actually had most all of the non-software challenges solved already. It turns out that datacenters and distribution centers go in the same kinds of places and have very similar kinds of challenges. They benefited significantly from knock-on effects from running their existing business.

That sounds good in a blurb in CIO Magazine but is likely completely disconnected from reality.

The complexity of building a cloud provider is not primarily in the physical management of physical assets in a big box building.

Having worked in several industries before landing in software development, I can tell you that the most common form of hubris we have as an industry is in thinking that our domain is where the hardest problems live. Or in thinking that the level of difficulty of our challenges has a 1:1 correlation with those of the business.

Building data centers is hard because there are not a lot of places that you can build them effectively. Large scale, specialty real estate deals are the kind of thing that effect a company's financials in a big way and for a long time -- much longer than the market cycles where you determine whether or not to continue or abandon your hypothetical, nascent cloud offering service -- and are exactly the type of thing that market investors will pillory your company for if you fuck up.

If you're Amazon and you're starting off in the datacenter game and it doesn't go well, you can always transition the property into a distribution center. Those are useful to you anyway.

If you're Facebook, what are you going to do? Who are you going to sell this $800-1200/sq ft (that is the cost of building a turnkey DC and puts AMZN's largest datacenter somewhere between 172-258mil and that's just one of them) "big box" to? They should make a multi-billion dollar investment for that and hire a global enterprise sales organization on top of that to sell it?

Maybe it's not so much that what CIOs say is divorced from reality but that they see reality at a scale that you don't. Their abstractions may not make sense to you.

microsoft did it pretty easily, albeit 4 years later than amazon, which is partially why they're playing catch up. microsoft didn't have any "industrial warehouse buying" expertise and was a lot more familiar with server tech than amazon was at the time they started aws in 2006, and probably had a good number of data centers already, they just weren't built for rental services.

although it's outside facebooks current core competency i think they wouldn't have too many issues getting into the cloud game if they wanted to. they could hire all the expertise they need and get 100 data centers up and running in 5 years.

but why would they? it's like google getting into the ISP market to compete with verizon et al. google runs its very profitable business on top of the commodity rails and keeps limited deployments of google fiber as a stick to threaten slow or uncooperative ISPs. facebook can run its profitable software based businesses on top of the infrastructure instead of joining the cutthroat race to the bottom of cloud computing that may or may not be semi nationalized/regulated as ISPs and utilities are today

Microsoft did it pretty easily because they have the financial flexibility to make a multi-billion dollar investment and already have a global enterprise sales and support organization with a 20 year head start on the competition.

Facebook can't say the same and getting 100 datacenters up and running would cost them 25 billion before hiring anyone -- that's more than half of their cash.

I agree with you though that it makes zero sense for Facebook to do this.