This is the point that the author makes in the second part of their post. Quote:
"The dutifully critical part of me wants to shout: you shouldn’t trust these slabs! Their operators, G — and A — and M — and the rest, will surely betray you. The very signature of the corporate internet is the way it slips from your grasp. The leviathans swim off in pursuit new markets, and what do they leave you with? Deprecation notices."
So, something like: "not your chips, not your code"?
This also really reminds me of the absolute squandering of resources by "modern" systems - old x86 DOS systems with 1/16,000 the memory and processing power were literally more responsive for everyday use than the mountians of framework junk we run on today. There is a lot of headroom left to downsize and create very useful machines.
Like, some sort of verifiable computing kind of deal.
Because I hadn’t read the quotation carefully (as otherwise I would have caught the part about depreciation notices before reading the article).
At some point, Microgoogazon transitions to being manufacturers and/or operators of the hardware, and the (perhaps nominal) ownership devolves to some variation on a public utility like electricity.
I like the idea of not having to worry about hardware when I'm more interested in software. But there's a certain amount of control that's given up when you relinquish ownership of the hardware. I don't like the idea of paying for things in a service model.
I'm approaching this from a personal perspective, not a business perspective. I'm completely comfortable with reducing my business's risk and liability by buying into hardware as a service. But I'm not as inclined to trust it for personal computing.