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Countries have run nationalise infrastructure before, and successfully. The problem is if they did not view it as nationalised infrastructure and instead viewed

by Guthur 2y ago

Countries have run nationalise infrastructure before, and successfully. The problem is if they did not view it as nationalised infrastructure and instead viewed it as some sort of mana that would fall from open source heaven. Open source software is the building blocks used by large rent (service fee) seeking corporations. They will extract large profits from any of these contracts and that is a demonstrable fact, they are also nearly all from the USA and so those profits will flow in one particular direction. It is also a historical fact that governments have run successful large scale infrastructure. Make your choice.

6510 2y ago
But it does run it in a particular way that isn't necessarily as profitable which in this example is a good thing. imho the question should be if the country continues to function if the project goes bankrupt. If it is so essential that it needs to be saved by the government (even in theory) then it lives outside the domain of capitalism.
JimDabell 2y ago
The point of going to big businesses for software services and support is that most customers don’t have needs that are large enough to justify the full-time staff needed for top-notch support. So companies that provide services amortise this over many customers and can employ n dozen full-time staff for a particular subsystem when the average customer might only need them a few times a year. So the tradeoff makes sense – even with a big profit margin, the customers still save money compared with DIY. This logic doesn’t really hold when it comes to large governments. Their needs are large enough that they can justify employing specialists. At that point, the profit margin the service business is capturing is just inefficiency. Internal services should be more common in large governments.
- iforgotpassword 2y ago
  It depends? Sometimes it is the feature set, but for example with future VMware pricing we'd be cheaper off hiring two full-time staff and running proxmox, which is currently being evaluated.
  - JimDabell 2y ago
    This depends on the level of support you need. Two members of staff might be fine for non-critical systems but it’s not enough to support anything that needs to be up 24/7. There’s not enough coverage and less than zero slack. If my alternative is to hire two people, I would rather spend the money with a company that is large enough to employ more people, in different timezones. But if most support can be handled by a larger body of existing staff and you only need specialists occasionally, then it might make sense.
- Qwertious 2y ago
  Theoretically the advantage of outsourcing to a business instead of running it inhouse is that you can put it out to tender, picking the most competent of the entire industry, whereas your inhouse team is what it is. In practice, Microsoft isn't going anywhere. You're just paying for an external inhouse.
  - jcgrillo 2y ago
    If you're a government you absolutely have the ability to compete with big tech, it's "just" a matter of political will. If you decide that it's important enough you can hire competitively from the same talent pool. Strategically it makes little sense to depend on another nation's companies to run your critical infrastructure. You have to own your dependencies.

by Guthur 2y ago

6510 2y ago

But it does run it in a particular way that isn't necessarily as profitable which in this example is a good thing. imho the question should be if the country continues to function if the project goes bankrupt. If it is so essential that it needs to be saved by the government (even in theory) then it lives outside the domain of capitalism.

JimDabell 2y ago

The point of going to big businesses for software services and support is that most customers don’t have needs that are large enough to justify the full-time staff needed for top-notch support. So companies that provide services amortise this over many customers and can employ n dozen full-time staff for a particular subsystem when the average customer might only need them a few times a year. So the tradeoff makes sense – even with a big profit margin, the customers still save money compared with DIY. This logic doesn’t really hold when it comes to large governments. Their needs are large enough that they can justify employing specialists. At that point, the profit margin the service business is capturing is just inefficiency. Internal services should be more common in large governments.

iforgotpassword 2y ago
It depends? Sometimes it is the feature set, but for example with future VMware pricing we'd be cheaper off hiring two full-time staff and running proxmox, which is currently being evaluated.
- JimDabell 2y ago
  This depends on the level of support you need. Two members of staff might be fine for non-critical systems but it’s not enough to support anything that needs to be up 24/7. There’s not enough coverage and less than zero slack. If my alternative is to hire two people, I would rather spend the money with a company that is large enough to employ more people, in different timezones. But if most support can be handled by a larger body of existing staff and you only need specialists occasionally, then it might make sense.
Qwertious 2y ago
Theoretically the advantage of outsourcing to a business instead of running it inhouse is that you can put it out to tender, picking the most competent of the entire industry, whereas your inhouse team is what it is. In practice, Microsoft isn't going anywhere. You're just paying for an external inhouse.
- jcgrillo 2y ago
  If you're a government you absolutely have the ability to compete with big tech, it's "just" a matter of political will. If you decide that it's important enough you can hire competitively from the same talent pool. Strategically it makes little sense to depend on another nation's companies to run your critical infrastructure. You have to own your dependencies.