3 ms·

There is bigger market forces that isn't being considered here - namely that the entire database as a service margins have been nearly driving down to zero by A

There is bigger market forces that isn't being considered here - namely that the entire database as a service margins have been nearly driving down to zero by AWS. Why do you think firebase had to sellout to Google ? Why did Parse shut down ? Simply because the big cloud vendors figured out that providing paas services at nearly the cost of the infrastructure will win them even more compute workloads which is the real money maker (especially if your are reducing your computer pricing slower than Moore's law)

dboreham 10y ago
Right on the money, so to speak. He says that the market was terrible because open source developer tools suffer from oversupply. I don't think that's what happened. Rather they chose to make a product for which the next best alternative (e.g. Mongo or Cassandra or MySQL or Postgresql) had almost zero cost. It doesn't matter how oversupplied the market is if someone is willing to give away a viable product for free. Perhaps "oversupply" is another way to say "someone was willing to sell at zero cost", I'm not sure. Unless you can find a set of customers who see significant value in your product vs. the alternative zero-cost product, you're never going to make money.
luhn 10y ago
> especially if your are reducing your computer pricing slower than Moore's law I agree with most of your comment, but I take issue with that last part. Moore's law has no relation to the price of computing. It only makes predictions on the number of transistors in a CPU, not the performance of the CPU nor the price/performance ratio of the CPU. Even if it did, compute costs much more than the CPUs; memory, disk, power, cooling, networking, enclosures, and more all cost a significant amount relative to the silicon. I know Google Cloud declared they were going to decrease prices at pace with Moore's law, but even if they can deliver on that it will be through innovations outside of the CPU.
sah2ed 10y ago
Actually, I think learning to understand how these (complex) market forces come into play is exactly why Slava added the recommendation to religiously read The Economist at the very end of the article for maximum effect.

dboreham 10y ago

Right on the money, so to speak. He says that the market was terrible because open source developer tools suffer from oversupply. I don't think that's what happened. Rather they chose to make a product for which the next best alternative (e.g. Mongo or Cassandra or MySQL or Postgresql) had almost zero cost. It doesn't matter how oversupplied the market is if someone is willing to give away a viable product for free. Perhaps "oversupply" is another way to say "someone was willing to sell at zero cost", I'm not sure. Unless you can find a set of customers who see significant value in your product vs. the alternative zero-cost product, you're never going to make money.

luhn 10y ago

> especially if your are reducing your computer pricing slower than Moore's law I agree with most of your comment, but I take issue with that last part. Moore's law has no relation to the price of computing. It only makes predictions on the number of transistors in a CPU, not the performance of the CPU nor the price/performance ratio of the CPU. Even if it did, compute costs much more than the CPUs; memory, disk, power, cooling, networking, enclosures, and more all cost a significant amount relative to the silicon. I know Google Cloud declared they were going to decrease prices at pace with Moore's law, but even if they can deliver on that it will be through innovations outside of the CPU.

sah2ed 10y ago

Actually, I think learning to understand how these (complex) market forces come into play is exactly why Slava added the recommendation to religiously read The Economist at the very end of the article for maximum effect.