Their abstraction for job scheduling (Tupperware) is about 5 years behind - something like Borg or EC2/EMR. Something like that is a fundamental reason why fb can’t do cloud as it is right now.
Plus, the infra teams do operate like product - impact at all costs. Which to most management translates to short-term impact over technical quality.
It would be a true 180 in terms of eng culture if they could pull off a cloud platform. An example is how they bought Parse and killed it, while firebase at google is doing extremely well.
Having said all that, I think focusing on impact over technical quality is probably the right business decision for what they were trying to do at the time - drive engagement and revenue.
Killing of Parse definitely showed that Facebook didn't want to be in PaaS/IaaS. Now, there's going to be severe trust issues with any PaaS/IaaS with a Facebook branding.
Parse was ahead of its time, good Engineering, nice documentations and possible the first platform to make building backend/database system for an app seamless. Even when Facebook killed it, they did a great job at open-sourcing the platform.[1]
I had migrated my existing services to open-source Parse and even built a stateless application with >250,000 users with it few years back. But if I had to build the same backend now, I'll probably do it with Go/pgSQL instead of NodeJS/MongoDB as in Parse.
Yep, I have to agree. Facebook in some ways is incredibly ahead of the game, and in other ways, is shockingly behind - I was baffled when I started working there.
this is true, but a lot of resources put into a new team that was completely walled off from the rest of the company, in terms of roadmaps and eng culture, could overcome this problem.
I think someone at Amazon in the mid-2000s would not have necessarily looked at their internal stack vs. other companies and picked them to become the breakout cloud winner, but when I was there (late 2000s), the AWS team was kept quite separate, and aside from things like S3 the retail side of the company wasn't really using much in the way of AWS infrastructure yet.
When you say that Tupperware is 5 years behind Borg, what do you mean? It would take 5 years to add current Borg features? It lacks features Borg had 5 years ago? Or it would take 5 years to reach parity with Borg as launched, i.e. it's actually 17+ years behind?
Also, the majority of their resources are web machines, running HHVM. These machines are just serving monkeys, which are highly optimized for that workload.
They may still get into the business, and it would make sense for them to do so, and may even solve their privacy problem while they are at it.
Amazon did it a long time ago, and when they started, they had no sales team. They had to build that capability slowly over time, but they had the first mover advantage, so they had time to learn. Now they are number one.
Microsoft already had the enterprise sales team, they had to learn how to sell cloud. They had some trouble with the shift, and with the technology, but now they are knocking it out of the park, and are solidly in the number two spot behind Amazon.
Google is struggling with their cloud business. While what they offer is technically superior to all their competitors, they don’t have the sales team, nor the experience in building one. They are trying, but they haven’t gotten the hang of it yet, and in the meantime, Amazon and Microsoft just keep growing.
This is the position Facebook would be in. They probably have the technology, or can at least attract the necessary talent to build it (I know that I would at least listen if they said, “Come build a new cloud with us from the ground up”). But they don’t have the enterprise sales team, just like Google.
Now, in Google’s defense, they have realized they are coming from behind, and as such have focused on selling their higher level services. If you want to do AI and Machine Learning, Google’s cloud is the place to do it! And then maybe while you’re there, if your core business is AI, maybe you’ll use some of their other services as well, since your data is already there.
Facebook could make a similar play. They could build a cloud and then require any 3rd party apps that work with Facebook to use their cloud. This would jumpstart their adoption, and could potentially help them solve their privacy issues. They could require that you never send any personal Facebook data out of their cloud, and could closely monitor all the outbound traffic. Then they could theoretically allow even more access to Facebook data, if they knew they could control what happens to that data after the 3rd party gets hold of it.
In other words they could launch a cloud that lets you run your 3rd party Facebook apps in a controlled and audited way, and even give you building blocks to do it quickly and efficiently. It would boost their bottom line, because there is good margins in compute and storage, and at the same time give them more control of their own data.
Google has a real trust issue with me that's twofold.
One is that you can't trust them to stick with a product offering. They are driven by a throw things at the wall and see what sticks strategy rather than some deeper vision for the world. So I'm always suspicious that they will abandon anything they launch.
Two is that they don't believe in offering quality support. I had this issue with an Android app recently. It got flagged incorrectly for a compliance concern and I was not able to reach a knowledgable human under any circumstances, including getting it escalated by internal Google staff. I would have easily paid a support contract, $1k or more, to get access to a human. In the end, I had to guess at what their algorithm was flagging and just ended up tricking it through trial and error.
Based on my conversation with my FB friends, FB's major challenge to tapping into cloud business is their "moving fast and breaking things" culture, and their arguably cut-throat impact-oriented perf system. We have to admit that not all tasks in development are glorious. Someone has to be on call. Someone has to fix all the important bugs. Someone has to implement features that customers ask for, even though the features may not be glorious. I personally even enjoy bug fixing, as it is closest to scientific investigation. However, would I prioritize bug fix if I were in FB? Hell no. I would launch launch launch, and show impact impact and impact. Would that be good for cloud customers or the business? Of course not. Would that erode customer trust in the long run? Oh yeah. Sometime somewhere a nasty bug will show up in this type of culture.
>Google is struggling with their cloud business. While what they offer is technically superior to all their competitors, they don’t have the sales team, nor the experience in building one. They are trying, but they haven’t gotten the hang of it yet, and in the meantime, Amazon and Microsoft just keep growing.
Don't forget the support. I used to work at a Series B startup, and AWS provided excellent support. We probably tossed them a few million a year, so I can only imagine what kind of white-glove top-tier support a big enterprise spender would've received.
We got responses for anything ranging from general UI questions to highly-in-the-weeds Redshift technical questions within 1 business day. >90% of the time, the issue was resolved upon the first response.
Google on the other hand, has very poor support. Facebook is by no means a support paragon either.
For this reason alone, I see a Microsoft-Amazon cloud duopoly with anyone else being a minor player as the only outcome. When shit hits the fan (as it is now) you need enterprise support capabilities.
> Google is struggling with their cloud business. While what they offer is technically superior to all their competitors, they don’t have the sales team
You sure about that? GCP has hired (or acquihired - Diane Greene for example) sales/management execs from all of the big boys in the industry (VMWare, SAP, Oracle, etc).
1) I see no indication it's "failing", just lagging behind the others.
2) My theory as to why its been lagging behind AWS/Azure is because of trust. AWS was first and is now the "no one got fired for using AWS" of cloud computing. Microsoft is simply entrenched. Oh you want to migrate your on-premise Hyper-V Windows OS's to Azure, we'll gladly help you click this button. Google is notorious for lack of "can I call a person?" support and I think that's permeated itself into its enterprise sales.
> Microsoft already had the enterprise sales team, they had to learn how to sell cloud.
They also had to grit there teeth and embrace Linux, which would have never happened if Ballmer was still there. There is just no demand/need for Windows only cloud offering. You want to be in cloud? You better embrace Linux.
> They could build a cloud and then require any 3rd party apps that work with Facebook to use their cloud
That sounds like an antitrust investigation waiting to happen. (Or it should; that Google hasn't been murdered by prosecutors suggests that the system isn't working as it should)
Facebook may be too late to the IaaS game which is already a crowded field. I think they could easily do PaaS/SaaS based on their bread and butter domains. Between FB, Insta and WhatsApp they are probably the top mobile developer in the world, handle more user-generated content than anyone and messaging. These are super valuable services. Imagine spinning up a business and subscribing to Facebook's content moderation tools or app deployment pipeline? Those would be extremely valuable and don't have an outright market leader right now.
Ive thought they should break into the "social network services" market for a long time. You want to build the next reddit or facebook, facebook is equipped to handle a lot of the heavy lifting. Facebook could profit off the competition, by selling them engineering and compute as a service, without having to gobble up every threat.
Parse doesn't seem to have been any kind of general-purpose cloud at all.
Rather, it appears a highly targeted backend specifically for mobile apps only. The article says "back-end services for data storage, notifications and user management".
They're some pieces of a cloud, for sure. But it's worlds away from the general-purpose offerings like AWS and Azure that the author is talking about. So not surprised the author didn't bother to mention it.
The difference is that Parse ran on AWS. In my opinion, the real reason Facebook isn't in the cloud business, and why Parse was eventually shuttered, is that Facebook will never allow external code to run anywhere in their network.
I worked at FB, and I think they would probably do OK if they entered the space as they are very smart about physical infrastructure, but the most plausible explanation I heard from an executive (forget which one) when asked this was that they are already building out at a very fast clip, and feel that they can make a better ROI by using that infrastructure themselves rather than renting it out.
If the growth knobs were turned off across all it's products and spare capacity became a thing, then it might make sense, but at the rate they are building there is no purpose to being a middle man.
Make a code optimization and save 1-2% of CPU on the web tier and you will be a hero.
Right now facebook has a couple options when a new network emerges. Buy the competitor, clone the competitor, ignore them, compete with a not completely similar product. Why not another option, like "take a percentage of their profit in exchange for service." I dont think it should be looked at as just as direct ROI, but also as a hedge against future obsolescence. Its a better position to be in, to be the ocean, if everybody wakes up one day and jumps ship.
Visa and Microsoft make a ton of money being a grease or tax on other business, a small shaving of money in exchange for massive efficiency, instead of trying to BE every business. Is anyone offering an out of the box Social Graph as a Service kit?
It would also be a huge growth opportunity for Facebook Ad Services, to be THE ad marketplace of all new social networks. And in a play right out of Adobe's playbook, buying some things like bigcommerce, ecommdash, shiptstation would position them to sell underlying services that allow their customers to compete directly with amazon, ebay, adobe, salesforce. There is surely a lot more money they could make selling saas and pass, vs becoming another generic iaas provider.
You make money if you are the #1 or #2 player in a market. If you are more like #4, you will just lose money. If Facebook tried to enter the cloud market today, they would be way behind. Without a unique advantage that would induce customers to switch, why would anyone switch? And if they tried to compete by cutting prices they would just lose money.
Without first-mover advantage, without the enterprise sales network it would be just foolish for FB to waste their time and energy on such highly competitive field without much of natural advantages. You don't really synergize social media with cloud infra.
And they know it too, so they rather compete in fields where they are good at, namely social media and apps. Maybe its part laziness, part lack of interest on their part too. But to me it would be wiser to focus on some promising new areas, rather than start catching up 2 laps behind the competition. Yet it's not easy, like VR/AR market shows. Maybe in ML services they could challenge Google a little more.
2) It would require a massive internal shift, The security tools internally for doing things like IAMs are far to primitive. It would take years to re-tool, stopping momentum on products that make money
3) its not where Zuckerberg see facebook in the future. That future is AR/VR.
Google stumbled with AR, It's structure means that any AR will eat at the mobile buisness.
Apple might make a splash, but its unlikely that they will be first to market.
Which leaves a whole segment for facebook to dominate, if it makes a decent product, and tackles it's image.
Apple just unveiled an ipad with lidar sensors. I would say Apple is poised to make the biggest impact since they can make the most phenomenal mass market hardware and well designed software to go with it.
AR/VR will still take a while to be mass market. We need a lot more compute, better algorithms and hardware.
All of these clouds are spawned out of already-large tech companies, many of whom have built a massive technical infrastructure to support their original businesses, then turn those resources into services to rent out in the form of cloud
This is a myth that’s been disputed several times by high ranking Amazon officials. Amazon never turned their internal infrastructure into AWS. It was always a completely separate initiative. Amazon was not on AWS for years.
Google also only uses GCP for a few internal services.
While they have competent infrastructure, an IaaS offering needs a platform whose capabilities are more complex than one where you're running only first-party applications. And even if they spent the time and effort, they'd be entering a commoditified, crowded field. All the big players can run servers, the value-add is from SaaS and/or surrounding PaaS, the latter of which they'd have to build from scratch.
Their previous forays into PaaS, done at a time when Twitter was also in this space, have faltered. And Facebook's pre-existing services are too far up the stack to be relevant to any IaaS ambition.
I doubt the 'trust issues' contribute significantly in Facebook's decision to not offer this, but I agree they'd be a factor for potential customers once the offering came to be. Facebook's branding is odd in that they've doubled down on the Facebook brand despite acquiring services that flourished in part for being "not Facebook". They seem resistant to rebrand into a holding company, and their choice supports the view that the company's tech mission is to remain tightly coupled with their flagship social network.
The big miss for Facebook isn’t cloud computing platforms, but mobile platforms. Mark has admitted this himself when asked what his mistakes/regrets are. It was easy to miss in the context of social’s massive growth. But the dust is settling and it is clear that mobile platforms hold tremendous power over consumere.
Based on what would they expect to win business, from whom? Could they do it at lower cost? Probably not. Do they have any technology that leapfrogs the others? Not aware of any. Do they have good business relationships for this sort of thing? No. So what else is there?
I don't think the author understands why/how Cloud business works.
Software is just part of it. It is a logistics problem fundamentally. And Amazon is not only a software shop, it is also the most advanced logistics company in US, both physically and virtually, and those two go hand-in-hand.
So no, I don't think FB can get into Cloud business anytime soon, and I also doubt they have that much of the cash to actually expand the business, it is going to be huge investment, globally. The market right now is not going to be forgiving to new comers.
I’d like to know why they’re not in the search business. They have enough signal from their platforms to offer great personalized search results and it would allow them to grow their ad revenue with intent based ads.
I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually did enter. I don't use FB personally, but I'm a big fan of the OSS efforts.
> biggest hurdle is trust, given its problematic record on data privacy
It is? FB is a corporation - much like Apple, Microsoft, Google & Amazon. Each of those have had their fair share of issues throughout the years.
Too easy to be polarised with stuff like this. FB produced good tech and supports it too - which is more than I can say for Google. But I'll use Google for their search & docs products, which is top notch. There are no heroes/villains.
Ads are a high margin business. When looking at FB vs AppMicroAmaGoog financials, Facebook has the highest % profit. They also make the most per employee. Plus they are the king of social networks with Insta & Whatsapp as their brands.
What works against them is Facebook doesn't have a great reputation with developers, so even if they step into cloud, it will be very hard. Plus corporations will always be worried that Facebook will peek into their usage and power their ads engine.
[+] [-] nikhilsimha|6 years ago|reply
Their abstraction for job scheduling (Tupperware) is about 5 years behind - something like Borg or EC2/EMR. Something like that is a fundamental reason why fb can’t do cloud as it is right now.
Plus, the infra teams do operate like product - impact at all costs. Which to most management translates to short-term impact over technical quality.
It would be a true 180 in terms of eng culture if they could pull off a cloud platform. An example is how they bought Parse and killed it, while firebase at google is doing extremely well.
Having said all that, I think focusing on impact over technical quality is probably the right business decision for what they were trying to do at the time - drive engagement and revenue.
[+] [-] Abishek_Muthian|6 years ago|reply
Parse was ahead of its time, good Engineering, nice documentations and possible the first platform to make building backend/database system for an app seamless. Even when Facebook killed it, they did a great job at open-sourcing the platform.[1]
I had migrated my existing services to open-source Parse and even built a stateless application with >250,000 users with it few years back. But if I had to build the same backend now, I'll probably do it with Go/pgSQL instead of NodeJS/MongoDB as in Parse.
[1]https://parseplatform.org/
[+] [-] anaisbetts|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mlinsey|6 years ago|reply
I think someone at Amazon in the mid-2000s would not have necessarily looked at their internal stack vs. other companies and picked them to become the breakout cloud winner, but when I was there (late 2000s), the AWS team was kept quite separate, and aside from things like S3 the retail side of the company wasn't really using much in the way of AWS infrastructure yet.
[+] [-] pier25|6 years ago|reply
Source?
It's certainly popular but everyone I know (me included) is running away from it asap.
[+] [-] thedance|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nappy-doo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ipsum2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] einarvollset|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] haolez|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jedberg|6 years ago|reply
Amazon did it a long time ago, and when they started, they had no sales team. They had to build that capability slowly over time, but they had the first mover advantage, so they had time to learn. Now they are number one.
Microsoft already had the enterprise sales team, they had to learn how to sell cloud. They had some trouble with the shift, and with the technology, but now they are knocking it out of the park, and are solidly in the number two spot behind Amazon.
Google is struggling with their cloud business. While what they offer is technically superior to all their competitors, they don’t have the sales team, nor the experience in building one. They are trying, but they haven’t gotten the hang of it yet, and in the meantime, Amazon and Microsoft just keep growing.
This is the position Facebook would be in. They probably have the technology, or can at least attract the necessary talent to build it (I know that I would at least listen if they said, “Come build a new cloud with us from the ground up”). But they don’t have the enterprise sales team, just like Google.
Now, in Google’s defense, they have realized they are coming from behind, and as such have focused on selling their higher level services. If you want to do AI and Machine Learning, Google’s cloud is the place to do it! And then maybe while you’re there, if your core business is AI, maybe you’ll use some of their other services as well, since your data is already there.
Facebook could make a similar play. They could build a cloud and then require any 3rd party apps that work with Facebook to use their cloud. This would jumpstart their adoption, and could potentially help them solve their privacy issues. They could require that you never send any personal Facebook data out of their cloud, and could closely monitor all the outbound traffic. Then they could theoretically allow even more access to Facebook data, if they knew they could control what happens to that data after the 3rd party gets hold of it.
In other words they could launch a cloud that lets you run your 3rd party Facebook apps in a controlled and audited way, and even give you building blocks to do it quickly and efficiently. It would boost their bottom line, because there is good margins in compute and storage, and at the same time give them more control of their own data.
[+] [-] tonystubblebine|6 years ago|reply
One is that you can't trust them to stick with a product offering. They are driven by a throw things at the wall and see what sticks strategy rather than some deeper vision for the world. So I'm always suspicious that they will abandon anything they launch.
Two is that they don't believe in offering quality support. I had this issue with an Android app recently. It got flagged incorrectly for a compliance concern and I was not able to reach a knowledgable human under any circumstances, including getting it escalated by internal Google staff. I would have easily paid a support contract, $1k or more, to get access to a human. In the end, I had to guess at what their algorithm was flagging and just ended up tricking it through trial and error.
[+] [-] hintymad|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oarabbus_|6 years ago|reply
Don't forget the support. I used to work at a Series B startup, and AWS provided excellent support. We probably tossed them a few million a year, so I can only imagine what kind of white-glove top-tier support a big enterprise spender would've received.
We got responses for anything ranging from general UI questions to highly-in-the-weeds Redshift technical questions within 1 business day. >90% of the time, the issue was resolved upon the first response.
Google on the other hand, has very poor support. Facebook is by no means a support paragon either.
For this reason alone, I see a Microsoft-Amazon cloud duopoly with anyone else being a minor player as the only outcome. When shit hits the fan (as it is now) you need enterprise support capabilities.
[+] [-] mbesto|6 years ago|reply
You sure about that? GCP has hired (or acquihired - Diane Greene for example) sales/management execs from all of the big boys in the industry (VMWare, SAP, Oracle, etc).
1) I see no indication it's "failing", just lagging behind the others.
2) My theory as to why its been lagging behind AWS/Azure is because of trust. AWS was first and is now the "no one got fired for using AWS" of cloud computing. Microsoft is simply entrenched. Oh you want to migrate your on-premise Hyper-V Windows OS's to Azure, we'll gladly help you click this button. Google is notorious for lack of "can I call a person?" support and I think that's permeated itself into its enterprise sales.
[+] [-] hitpointdrew|6 years ago|reply
They also had to grit there teeth and embrace Linux, which would have never happened if Ballmer was still there. There is just no demand/need for Windows only cloud offering. You want to be in cloud? You better embrace Linux.
[+] [-] notyourwork|6 years ago|reply
I don't have exposure to their offerings but I've heard this and it is rarely qualified with specifics. What is it they have that is superior?
[+] [-] yjftsjthsd-h|6 years ago|reply
That sounds like an antitrust investigation waiting to happen. (Or it should; that Google hasn't been murdered by prosecutors suggests that the system isn't working as it should)
[+] [-] tootie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dilyevsky|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] basch|6 years ago|reply
https://telegra.ph/Facebook-Social-Services-FbSS-a-missed-op...
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] herostratus101|6 years ago|reply
No it's not...
[+] [-] pavlov|6 years ago|reply
https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/25/facebook-parse
[+] [-] bigtones|6 years ago|reply
The article is referring to IaaS from my initial read.
https://www.facebook.com/workplace
[+] [-] crazygringo|6 years ago|reply
Rather, it appears a highly targeted backend specifically for mobile apps only. The article says "back-end services for data storage, notifications and user management".
They're some pieces of a cloud, for sure. But it's worlds away from the general-purpose offerings like AWS and Azure that the author is talking about. So not surprised the author didn't bother to mention it.
[+] [-] s_m|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gfosco|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] efsavage|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mgiampapa|6 years ago|reply
If the growth knobs were turned off across all it's products and spare capacity became a thing, then it might make sense, but at the rate they are building there is no purpose to being a middle man.
Make a code optimization and save 1-2% of CPU on the web tier and you will be a hero.
[+] [-] the_watcher|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] basch|6 years ago|reply
Visa and Microsoft make a ton of money being a grease or tax on other business, a small shaving of money in exchange for massive efficiency, instead of trying to BE every business. Is anyone offering an out of the box Social Graph as a Service kit?
It would also be a huge growth opportunity for Facebook Ad Services, to be THE ad marketplace of all new social networks. And in a play right out of Adobe's playbook, buying some things like bigcommerce, ecommdash, shiptstation would position them to sell underlying services that allow their customers to compete directly with amazon, ebay, adobe, salesforce. There is surely a lot more money they could make selling saas and pass, vs becoming another generic iaas provider.
https://telegra.ph/Facebook-Social-Services-FbSS-a-missed-op...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19868341
[+] [-] not2b|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seshagiric|6 years ago|reply
How does entering into Cloud Business align to the company mission? Wouldn't it be a distraction?
[+] [-] stopachka|6 years ago|reply
The main reason is because it doesn't align with FB's values.
How is building a cloud business going to connect the world?
(As fluffy as this sounds, mission was taken seriously -- all the way up to Schrep)
[+] [-] tekkk|6 years ago|reply
And they know it too, so they rather compete in fields where they are good at, namely social media and apps. Maybe its part laziness, part lack of interest on their part too. But to me it would be wiser to focus on some promising new areas, rather than start catching up 2 laps behind the competition. Yet it's not easy, like VR/AR market shows. Maybe in ML services they could challenge Google a little more.
[+] [-] KaiserPro|6 years ago|reply
1) its hard to do well and still be profitable.
2) It would require a massive internal shift, The security tools internally for doing things like IAMs are far to primitive. It would take years to re-tool, stopping momentum on products that make money
3) its not where Zuckerberg see facebook in the future. That future is AR/VR.
Google stumbled with AR, It's structure means that any AR will eat at the mobile buisness.
Apple might make a splash, but its unlikely that they will be first to market.
Which leaves a whole segment for facebook to dominate, if it makes a decent product, and tackles it's image.
[+] [-] nojvek|6 years ago|reply
AR/VR will still take a while to be mass market. We need a lot more compute, better algorithms and hardware.
[+] [-] scarface74|6 years ago|reply
This is a myth that’s been disputed several times by high ranking Amazon officials. Amazon never turned their internal infrastructure into AWS. It was always a completely separate initiative. Amazon was not on AWS for years.
Google also only uses GCP for a few internal services.
[+] [-] AznHisoka|6 years ago|reply
1) being too late in the game, at this stage.
2) unable to rebrand themselves as a trustworthy service for enterprises. They're stuck with the "social" and "fun" label.
[+] [-] niftich|6 years ago|reply
Their previous forays into PaaS, done at a time when Twitter was also in this space, have faltered. And Facebook's pre-existing services are too far up the stack to be relevant to any IaaS ambition.
I doubt the 'trust issues' contribute significantly in Facebook's decision to not offer this, but I agree they'd be a factor for potential customers once the offering came to be. Facebook's branding is odd in that they've doubled down on the Facebook brand despite acquiring services that flourished in part for being "not Facebook". They seem resistant to rebrand into a holding company, and their choice supports the view that the company's tech mission is to remain tightly coupled with their flagship social network.
[+] [-] enos_feedler|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] umeshunni|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daxfohl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tanilama|6 years ago|reply
Software is just part of it. It is a logistics problem fundamentally. And Amazon is not only a software shop, it is also the most advanced logistics company in US, both physically and virtually, and those two go hand-in-hand.
So no, I don't think FB can get into Cloud business anytime soon, and I also doubt they have that much of the cash to actually expand the business, it is going to be huge investment, globally. The market right now is not going to be forgiving to new comers.
Disclaimer: ex-AWS employee
[+] [-] barryrandall|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m_ke|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beardedman|6 years ago|reply
> biggest hurdle is trust, given its problematic record on data privacy
It is? FB is a corporation - much like Apple, Microsoft, Google & Amazon. Each of those have had their fair share of issues throughout the years.
Too easy to be polarised with stuff like this. FB produced good tech and supports it too - which is more than I can say for Google. But I'll use Google for their search & docs products, which is top notch. There are no heroes/villains.
[+] [-] nojvek|6 years ago|reply
Ads are a high margin business. When looking at FB vs AppMicroAmaGoog financials, Facebook has the highest % profit. They also make the most per employee. Plus they are the king of social networks with Insta & Whatsapp as their brands.
What works against them is Facebook doesn't have a great reputation with developers, so even if they step into cloud, it will be very hard. Plus corporations will always be worried that Facebook will peek into their usage and power their ads engine.