FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

Re:FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes by kragen on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @08:02PM (#31995230)

Ford and GM and Freightliner are not in a position to use price discrimination to confiscate FedEx's entire profits; if they try to sell trucks to FedEx at an inflated price, FedEx can just buy the same trucks from dealers, or buy them used, or buy GM trucks instead of Freightliner trucks.

By contrast, generally speaking, cloud providers are in an excellent position to use price discrimination to extract the entire surplus value of every transaction. And the flexibility and reliability provided by FedEx will to a significant extent simply be that of their computers.

(As chrisseaton pointed out, Boeing is in a cloudier position.)

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Re:FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes by jollybean on Wednesday July 06, 2022 @07:19PM (#32008113)

So 100% yes, AWS has much more power in the value chain than Ford. But not really.

Especially to the extent that special services are not leveraged, then there are cheaper alternatives. A lot of IT is just 'instances' not 'fancy cloud queues'.

AWS pricing is very transparent and people can make the decisions they want. Generally speaking, AWS does not price discriminate on the basis of 'business model' and their margins are meaningless with respect to the overall business efforts of a Big Co.

I mean - unless you are doing big AI crunching, or 'free hosting content' - then frankly the AWS bill is not going to be a huge line item relative to overall operating costs.

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