I pay a barber to cut my hair. Sure, I could learn how to cut my own hair, but there's a good chance I'll spend a lot of time and still mess it up.
I pay a mechanic to fix my car for serious repair. Sure, I could learn how to replace a transmission, but there's a good chance I'll spend a lot of time and still mess it up.
If these (and the endless examples of paying professionals) are a tax for stupidity and laziness, then everyone is lazy and stupid. If you're not a software company, there's a good chance it's worth it to save the time to pay someone to set it up for you. Also, if Joe's Fish Market wants a POS system and needs a server for it and he decides to set it up himself, if he gets it up and running, what are the chances it'll stay up to day and not have a firewall issue? Probably pretty low compared to if a professional did it.
Joe wants to focus on selling fish. That's where he's a pro. I don't know anything about fish, but I could set up a server for him. We all have our own skills, and it's often worth while to leverage other people's skills, because they'll do it faster, better, and it will likely end up cheaper after time and security are taken into consideration.
Meaningless analogy. Here some other meaningless analogies:
Why would anyone ever own a frying pan? Not only do you need to rent a stove, you also need to hire a chef to cook with frying pan, you need a station with chefs that prep ingredients and so on. Just go to a restaurant.
You pay a mechanic to fix your car? Why would anyone ever own a car when you can rent a car whenever you need one.
You pay a barber to cut your hair? Why not just wear a wig!
And so on ...
And many, many people don’t own a car, not because they can’t afford one but because it makes more sense to rent one or hire a car service when needed. Frankly, my dream scenario is to have enough money to hire a personal driver who is on-demand and at the ready when I need to go out and do things. For plenty of people, that’s anathema. But for me, I don’t like driving (or cooking) and I’d much rather pay someone to do it for me.
The same is true for software. I like tinkering with a lot of my own software, but if I was building my own business, I sure as shit would rather pay for an established company to handle some of the grunt work, rather than hiring dedicated teams that in aggregate would cost a lot of money.
The rise of SaaS and PaaS isn’t just laziness. It’s a recognition that for a lot of people, even developers, we’d rather entrust a lot of the operations and IT work to someone else.
For some — but not all — people, that’s a preferable option.
For some — but not all — companies, enterprise tech is a preferable option.
And when putting in the well, why would you pay someone else to dig it for you? Just laziness. Dig it yourself!
And then when digging the well, why would you rent the drill? Just laziness, outsourcing the maintenance and ownership costs to someone else.
And then why bother buying the drill at some market where they're then manufacturing the drill for you? Pure laziness. Just make the drill yourself!
Or maybe, you just go with a trusted service instead of learning how to manufacture digging equipment when all you really want is running water.
Also literally everyone and every company relies on someone else to provide some services or hardware to enable people to do their job and live. Even this conversation could not even happen without other people making sure internet connections are kept stable. This whole "one person is an island" ideology is not something a lot of people subscribe to.
Some companies don't want to spend time doing software things that are not core to their business, so they pay other companies which sometimes do it better. Most definitely not always, but for some companies it would still be better than some in-house hodgepodge.
Uber is actually cheaper for me than a car + insurance + maintenance. I work from home. I’m going to give my car to my son when we move.
When I need to see my parents 200 miles away, I can hop on a small plane for $300 round trip and just work from there for a week.
Companies these days just want to specialize in making cool menu designs and marketing and waiting on the three star Michelin review to roll in somehow.
That would be like a Hypervisor company paying VMWare to re-distribute ESXi or something.
But a farm company buying VMWare ESXi to run its IT infra instead of using, say, CentOS is exactly like a chef sourcing ingredients instead of growing them herself.
One part of the dynamic, simplified: big companies can show quickest cost savings by laying off employees; this satisfies anxious shareholders during the bumpy times by suggesting that management is wiling to make "hard decisions." Such companies cannot quickly re-tool their technology stacks nor renegotiate 3-year software contracts. B2B companies tend to do very well as long as they are not solely focused on their startup/growth/pre-IPO customers, who get hit hard.
Here are some arguments for post-downturn tech growth: 1981 and the use of the PC + Lotus/WordPerfect/BASIC for efficient local compute 1990 and the surge of the LAN to replace centralized IT 2001 and the swell of SaaS 2008 and the swell of cloud 2022 and the .....
