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The Remarkable Incompetence At The Heart Of Tech
(www.wheresyoured.at)
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
That was a deliberate offer from Big Tech: put aside your old convival systems and let us handle the details. Google deliberately deskilled web search, other companies broke systems administration and software packages that users can understand and edit. The point is that once you don't understand the details and cannot operate on your own, the big company can do what it likes and you have to take it. Organizations who switch to AWS rarely find that it saved them money but hiring a new team of IT people to build an alternative would be a hassle.
I think there's some truth to that, but it also bears acknowledging that the market demand existed already. The number of people who can get a lot of benefit from IT productivity tools is much higher than the number of people who are willing to do the work of maintaining and customizing their own stuff. From an organizational perspective, it often ends up making more sense to directly contract with a known and trusted third party instead of developing the native capabilities, and at that point the tools and skills themselves start to specialize in ways to provide IT as a service at scale. Economies of scale lend themselves to efficiency but at the cost of resiliency and concentrating power, and tech companies chasing the line ever upwards have been abusing the absolute hell out of that, but while they have been altering the deal (pray they do not alter it any further) their bullshit is not the only reason why the deal exists in the first place.