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Re:Google cuts jobs at cloud-computing group by rossdavidh on Saturday February 15, 2020 @10:24AM (#22335781)
I think there will also be an enormous drop in revenue once the next recession comes. A lot of loss-making companies, aiming to grow as fast as possible using VC money, use cloud providers because it's one less thing they have to learn how to do. If they have an actual business model, like Dropbox, they eventually self-host. If they don't, and didn't really expect to have to develop a business model other than "grow really big", then once the VC spigot gets turned off they will shut down.

It is much like the late 90's boom, when a lot of companies were selling banner ads to each other. Even the ones who appeared to be profitable weren't really, because all of their customers were not. Once the loss-making customers of cloud companies go away, the big three cloud companies may find that they don't have a business model either.

Re:Google cuts jobs at cloud-computing group by samatman on Saturday February 15, 2020 @12:53PM (#22336717)
Dropbox is a poor example to generalize from, since in a very real sense they're a cloud provider. They make bank directly on server administration, so cheaper servers translate directly to the bottom line. They would have to be incredibly foolish not to in-house this at some point.

Most SaaS etc. businesses make money in a way that is indirectly related to their server costs. Bringing the cost of servers down increases margin ceteris paribus, but the Latin is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

It's not at all clear to me that the median AWS customer can save money by going self-hosting. If I had to bet money on it, I'd bet against it.

Re:Google cuts jobs at cloud-computing group by oblio on Saturday February 15, 2020 @11:44AM (#22336275)
You should check infrastructure costs for band or other big enterprises... Those companies move to the cloud because it's cheaper...
Re:Google cuts jobs at cloud-computing group by cameronbrown on Saturday February 15, 2020 @02:11PM (#22337226)
Startups are not the primary customer of cloud providers. Enterprises are - and arguably that's where all the money is.