Comment by israrkhan
8 months ago
In this day and age, it is almost impossible for certain businesses not to build on someone's else kingdom.
Facebook, instagram, uber, lyft, doordash, instacart, and hundreds of unicorn businesses are literally built on top of ecosystems that are controlled by 2 or 3 companies.
> In this day and age, it is almost impossible for certain businesses not to build on someone's else kingdom.
No it is not
It is often difficult and expensive, relative to letting Facebook (or the like) do the hosting.
But VPSs are a thing, you can run almost any software on them.
Stretching the analogy: Build your castle on your own bedrock, and build "forts", or "outposts", on the enemy territory
Ignoring Facebook et. el. is stupid, but depending on them is fool hardy
Thats not what other people's kingdoms means. Basically all non-trivial apps are already built on VPSs. The other people's kingdoms refers to how people interact with your app. Take Zynga - they were not literally running on FB servers, I'm sure they had their own VPS, but their games just had 0 reach outside of FB. When FB decided to change things Zynga just got fucked, VPS or not.
If you have a possible very high return for taking that risk (as the unicorn businesses do) then do it in full knowledge of the risk.
I am not convinced those businesses are good examples. Could they have redeployed elsewhere if they had to? Where they tied to one supplier? Did they have backups else where?
Most businesses and individuals do not have to take that risk and can avoid it.
The key insight is that mitigating risk isn’t a free action. No business has the bandwidth to avoid even most of the risks they could in principle avoid; you allocate some effort towards the ones that make sense to mitigate, and hope the others don’t come to pass.
But relying on other people's kingdom isn't free either, that comes with a cost.
The fallacy I hear often is that because something like AWS is sooo much more expensive than co-location or VPS, that it must be easier.
Yeah, it can be... sometimes. It almost never is. You trade off the complexity for new complexity. You replace your sysadmins with Dev Ops. It's not like it just magically gets better.
It's the same way with a lot of things. A more expensive car is not necessarily better. It can be, sometimes, if you're very careful and know what you're doing. More expensive clothes aren't better either. Popularity factors into this, too. Just because something is popular doesn't mean it's good. Plenty of really shitty things become popular.
You can absolutely build your application without relying on other companies too much. I'm not saying you need to go rogue, but you also don't need to use every single Google feature under the sun to, like, display some photos. And, if you do that, that's actually probably way worse and more expensive (effort + money) than if you didn't.
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There was a fleeting moment where the Internet was the "Wild West" but we are long past that. The GP's idiom is about as practical as "don't be a citizen of any state".
That is a really great analogy and it's so true.
The only counter point I can think of is that you can always choose to build upon multiple tech platforms simultaneously, and depending on the technology you need, it might not even add all that much additional cost to do so.
> In this day and age, it is almost impossible for certain businesses not to build on someone's else kingdom.
No it is not. It is only the greed for bigger profits. If a company can work with Microsoft, it can also work with LibreOffice. But LibreOffice doesn't promise them the moon, while sucking every cent out of them.
I mean, technically you don't have to use those ecosystems and could roll your own stuff, including infrastructure instead of AWS but it's definitely going to be expensive.
Which is why we need regulation for those big players (gatekeepers as the EU has taken to calling them). If you're going to be so huge that you essentially operate your own market and economy, then you need to be regulated like one, and forced to play nice, interoperate, and not favor your own services.
Not so technically, your business needs customers and efficiencies. Big tech strategically positions themselves at those choke points.
But realistically , if Google and Apple both for whatever reason banned you from all their services, idk why, then you would not have access to a phone. So then you say, well, it was just one person in ten million, and they probably did something wrong-- and now you share the same perspective as Big Tech on this specific issue.
There's a good reason they're called unicorns. That's not a strategy you should adopt for any business that's actually important to you.
If you have billions of dollars of revenue, you can make the law of tort work the way it is supposed to.