He is resigning from a job, what else should we think? If something really dangerous was happening he would be doing a whistleblower or at minimum talk to a lawyer. The thing is, the complete lack of transparency makes it hard to assess OpenAI and Anthropic. If they were quoted on the stock market, we could at least rely on some basic audits and reporting requirements.
$80 per month in a 5,000 people Enterprise is 400k per month which translates to ~5m per year. That is easily in the 8-16% of their total IT budget. I don’t know you, but companies don’t like to increase recurring cost. Is AI good? Yes. Is it clear how it generates enough ROI to justify a material IT cost increase? No. This is the problem now, not how much white collar workers use AI, but what is the productivity narrative of it. Because AI is so generic, there is no clear specialized use case, like when Salesforce invented the CRM for example.
The thing that's a bit different about AI from a CRM is it translates pretty directly into time savings. You only need each employee to save 1-2 hours of work per month to break even with a $80/seat subscription.
It's true that it can easily save 1-2 hours per month, but it only seems worth it if those hours saved are spent doing something else productive/profitable.
It appears that a lot of the time saved is spent either 1) doing nothing instead, 2) waiting for the AI to finish, or 3) increasing the hours spent elsewhere down/up the chain for reviewing, fixing, auditing.
The obvious benefit of anything offering to save time is that now you have time for "higher order work", but often, we use the time saved to be lazy.
After all, that's the underlying reason we used the time-saving, corner-cutting tool in the first place.
People will pay out of their pockets if an AI can free up a few of their hybrid hours a month. And already it looks like the vast majority of white collar AI spend is from individuals, not companies.
I mean, why would you show your hand by using the company AI? Use your AI and take the credit...
What is rational about this exactly? They share no borders with the countries most immigrants come from, they are moving the problem to Spain, Italy, Greece.
Is 20b euro enough to be a real alternative? Just a question. The thing with managed services in customer infra is interesting… but I am afraid it is motivated by the fact that many customers are not interested in paying SAP Cloud over their currently working SAP on premise setup. Let’s also keep in mind this is the company that has rarely embraced open protocols, built lots of proprietary stuff (abap…) and rarely cares about good APIs. How they should build a proper PaaS, with what skills, culture, know how, should be the question.
Is Hetzner even interested in offering anything other than VPS? There are many companies in Europe that offer a much more cloudy/managed approach, like Scaleway or STACKIT. Hetzner has object storage now but nothing else really.
Hetzner has really important features than AWS/Azure/GCP do not have.
My favourite is simplicity. I can understand its Cloud offering in minutes, use it to its full potential within hours to solve business problems. Back when I worked for an AWS-based unicorn, AWS took lion's share of my time.
My second favourite is the ability to move resources between accounts. The effort my fellow colleagues spend now for such migrations is enormous, and they justify it by saying that even AWS can not do this without destroying/recreating resources and copying data.
It's impossible to say because unfortunately the article doesn't actually say anything about what the hell they're claiming to build.
Is 20B enough to offer a competitor to AWS? Not a chance in hell. But that specifically say that's not what they're offering.
The only other meaning I can assign to "cloud" is IT infrastructure. I think you can easily compete with Google Workspace for 20B. But I think that's probably not what they meant, I think they just meant "here are some buzzwords and a big number, please write an article about us".
(The other meaning for "cloud" that you can obviously build for 20B is something like Hetzner. But... We already have that).
Anyway, there are obviously pretty serious things you can build for 20B and it's probably good if we try to build some of them in Europe...
It's the Excel thing. Excel has a ton of features.
Everyone only uses 10% of them and complains that it'd be a lot simpler to use if the 90% went away.
But everyone uses a different 10% of it =)
The same is true with cloud offerings. There's no way to force full feature parity with AWS without a trillion euro investment.
But can they find the 10% that is enough for the relevant users? The ones that can't for legal and privacy reasons have their data exist physically in the US or even within US companies.
Since we're talking about Europe, my first instinct here is that I want to double-check what they mean by "billion"[1].
This article being in English makes me assume short scale, but SAP being German makes it possible (even if unlikely) that it could be a mistranslation that everyone else just copied.
If only any of these articles could link to a source. But searching for literal quotes doesn't seem to return any authoritative source, or even any transcripts (if this was announced verbally).
and the relevant quote: "Durch eine langfristige Investition von über 20 Milliarden Euro setzt SAP einen klaren strategischen Fokus auf digitale Souveränität."
His framing is that markets are collective consensus and if you claim to “know better”, you need to write a lot more than a generic post. It’s so simple, and it is a reminder that antirez’s reputation as a software developer does not automatically translate to economics expert.
I think you are mixed up here. I quoted from the comment above mine, which was harshly and uncharitably critical of antirez’s blog post.
I was pushing back against that comment’s snearing smugness by pointing to an established field that uses clear terminology about how and why markets are useful. Even so, I invited an explanation in case I was missing something.
Anyone curious about the terms I used can quickly find explanations online, etc.
I wonder if a managed K8S approach wouldn’t be better? Most Enterprises I know will anyway need to deploy legacy software, so the need for something like K8S never really goes away. The question is if EU Enterprises really need stuff like AWS Sagemaker rather than just spinning up Jupyter Hub on K8S…
> if EU Enterprises really need stuff like AWS Sagemaker
The author already makes it clear that replicating for example AWS is not desirable.
AWS Sagemaker is basically an app running on EC2 (for Notebooks, training, inference) and S3 for the data. And that's what needs to be set up first: EC2 and S3 (and incidentally also IAM, VPC and SQS).
Unsurprisingly those have been also the first services that AWS released.
It was a wonder to observe Kubernetes take over the server room infrastructure by storm while morphing from being exactly the wrong tool to manage legacy software to the default option for lift-and-shift cloud migrations.
I still wonder how much K8S is a the right platform to deploy database software or weblogic clusters.
