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Tech's broken promises: Streaming is now just as expensive and confusing as cable. Ubers cost as much as taxis. And the cloud is no longer cheap. (www.businessinsider.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@hexbear.net
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[–] 24 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (4 children)

Look I hate to be that girl but this is a terrible Business Insider tabloid shit

Ubers are way cheaper than taxis still. Largely due to paying their workers way less than what cab drivers make. The article cherry picked a ride from downtown NYC and a trip from a busy airport

Cloud computing is still way cheaper to rent than to build out by yourself. It'd take years and tons of millions yearly to get people to develop the same capabilities

This is some weird contrarian Luddite article for boomers reminiscing about the good old days where capitalism wasn't destroying the world nearly as much as it is now

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago

    Yeah they could have limited the scope to movie/tv streaming services and been fine. But music and video games streaming are still decent value propositions for consumers.

    Specialization isn't inherently a problem, nor are centralization or decentralization. The problem ultimately comes down to private property and the resulting power imbalances and adverse incentives.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Cloud computing CAN be cheaper but it can also be way more expensive. It is not a panacea.

    It’s cheaper for companies that have unpredictable traffic/capacity. It lets you scale up/down without having build out physically.

    For businesses with steady, predictable traffic it can be far more expensive. You buy the servers, you own them. They can run for years.

    Cloud can get pricey veeeery quickly.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    If it was cheaper large companies would not all have moved to cloud, especially since it costs a very large upfront cost to migrate all that over if you already have a full setup

    Netflix used to have one of the best homegrown infrastructure and even they moved everything off to AWS

    I've worked at a place that mostly just served videos and had 100M users (no idea what the DAU/MAU was). The AWS bill was ~800k a year

    Just buying the land and building all the data centers across multiple continents would probably bankrupt the entire company, forget about building all that software and setting up the hardware and configs by themselves

    It's only cheaper for tiny companies, but even then, no company ever has the goal of staying small

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