[Diederich]

Recently, something quite rare happened. I needed to Xerox some paper documents. Well, such actions are rare today, but years ago, it was quite common to Xerox things.

Over time, the meaning of the word 'Xerox' changed. More specifically, it gained a new meaning. For a long time, Xerox only referred to a company named in 1961. Some time in the late 60s, it started to be used as a verb, and as I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, the word 'Xerox' was overwhelmingly used in its verb form.

Our society decided as a whole that it was ok for the noun Xerox to be used a verb. That's a normal and natural part of language development.

As others have noted, management doesn't care whether the serverless thing you want to use is running on servers or not. They care that they don't have to maintain servers themselves. CapEx vs OpEx and all that.

I agree that there could be some small hazard with the idea that, if I run my important thing in a 'serverless' fashion, then I don't have to associate all of the problems/challenges/concerns I have with 'servers' to my important thing.

It's an abstraction, and all abstractions are leaky.

If we're lucky, this abstraction will, on average, leak very little.

[philsnow]

> Over time, the meaning of the word 'Xerox' changed. More specifically, it gained a new meaning. For a long time, Xerox only referred to a company named in 1961. Some time in the late 60s, it started to be used as a verb, and as I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, the word 'Xerox' was overwhelmingly used in its verb form.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZbqAMEwtOE#t=5m58s I don't think this dramatization (of a court proceedings from 2010) is related to Xerox's plight with losing their trademark, but said dramatization is brilliant nonetheless