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Re:FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes by jeffbee on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @10:12AM (#31988406)
That’s an incredibly silly take. Our whole economy is based on specialization. FedEx will never be as good at running datacenter as Amazon or Google. There’s room in the system for the cloud operator to earn a profit while still offering the product at a lower cost than anyone else can achieve in-house.

Apple fairly notoriously hosts iCloud in other company’s clouds, and they’re a computer hardware and software company! If you’re less sophisticated than Apple, it’s a no-brainer to go with clouds.

Re:FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes by jotterbrain on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @02:54PM (#31992217)
The part about Apple is not accurate. Apple operates several dozen datacenters, has spent north of $30 billion building them and expanding them in recent years, operates their own Kubernetes (was Mesos) cloud platform that looks a lot like Heroku internally, and leverages public cloud for a couple parts of iCloud as a redundancy play, and no more. Maps helped prompt the expansion from single-homed iTunes legacy datacenter strategy, but even that iTunes legacy has been online since the early 2000s. Note that my context ends almost a decade ago, so, there’s that. The fleet dedicated to Maps alone when I worked there was large enough to be its own FAANG/MAMAA.

They’re in the datacenter game long term. In no universe does Apple “host iCloud in other company’s clouds”. Apple is notoriously a control freak and would never place their strategic services at the whim of cloud AZs. That idea was proposed and quickly eliminated. (Believe it or not, it is possible to spend that much on Azure/GCP and still only use it for basically blobs. How do you think they moved so easily in 2018ish?)

Re:FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes by kragen on Sunday July 10, 2022 @11:57AM (#32045857)
While my take may be incredibly silly, jwb, it is a different take than the one you're arguing against, and in some sense diametrically opposed.

My argument is not that specialization in informatics operations is unprofitable; rather, it's that specialization in informatics operations is indispensable for maintaining the negotiating position required to earn a profit. I'm not arguing that there isn't room in the system for the cloud operator to earn a profit; I'm arguing that after committing themselves completely and irrevocably to cloud operators, FedEx will no longer be allowed to earn a profit, or rather, just enough profit to keep their stock price from collapsing.

Now, it may be that the advantage of specializing in informatics is so powerful that this situation is unavoidable, and the only viable option for companies like FedEx is to become, in a sense, franchises of Amazon, Microsoft, Google, or Baidu. You remember when this happened to companies like Intergraph in the 01990s: they were reduced to undifferentiated Microsoft resellers. And it's not clear they really had another option. I'm not confident that the situation is currently so extreme, but maybe it is.

As other commenters have noted, you were pretty comprehensively wrong about iCloud, but that's a minor supporting point.