Item — HN Reader

That's an interesting perspective. I agree we have gone through cycles of centralization/decentralization and that events will cause flutters of movement in both directions, that's natural. As another comment mentioned, a hybrid approach will likely be a strong story in the years to come.

However the real purpose of innovation is not to simply drive price down, rather, to create enabling technologies that move mankind forward and allow people to do things they've never even imagined. We're seeing massive things with massive processing power and data, all while someone else manages that infrastructure, who LOVES managing things at scale, who I can't afford to hire an who has become the expert I never will be.

If the goal is simply to reduce cost, then we aren't creating something big. We're just moving money around.

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In a way, I think reducing cost is often (not always) a necessary first step to enabling the big-picture visions you're describing. For example, cheap desalination means water for drought-struck Saharan Africans; cheap food saves lives worldwide; cheap computing leads to the situation we have today. "Moving money around" is not valueless by itself; that is, after all, what banks (and even currency itself) exist to accomplish, and manage to scrape by at it.

But again, taking your position at face value, I would counter that the level of expertise needed to maintain the data needs of most people is very modest compared to the level of expertise needed to sell everyone that amount of data at scale. If your needs are not dramatic (and most people's aren't) then "the cloud" may turn out to be more expensive than doing it yourself on top of the usual downsides of outsourcing. Not everybody has a scalability problem. And if you do have a scalability problem but your income is directly proportional to the scale, it may be cheaper to run it yourself anyway and hire those scalability experts. There are more cloud providers every year, not fewer, and Amazon and Google did it out of necessity and made a profit long before they realized they could monetize it.

In short, I think there are arguments for and against, like everything else, and people should understand the upsides and the downsides before choosing. Once the pendulum swings back there will be people leaving the cloud who probably should be there and I'll be arguing for them to use it, but for right now it seems like the herd is recklessly choosing the cloud without understanding why.