I don't understand this point. If there's a risk that demand will collapse isn't it better not to own the data centers? By renting CF can reduce their costs quickly in the face of falling demand. That's a feature.

An AWS, Azure, or Google DDoS protection product could eat Cloudflare’s market in a hot minute. Cloudflare can’t escape being a “feature” of a cloud provider.

This is also true of any other software company though - at some point a bigger company might offer whatever product as a feature. It's just a risk of building a software company - what we build is largely straightforward to copy. That doesn't mean there's no value in software as a product though.

But it’s not an asset. Do you know what an asset is?

Akamai is the leading global CDN provider, want to guess how many data centers they own? Sure, owning a data center is an asset, but it’s also a liability too.

When whole species get torn down in one solar year bc some other species began to adopt a winning adaptation, that seems prone to overshooting (excessive curve fitting to the first derivative), with odd/suboptimal outcomes as no surprise.