Comment by IG_Semmelweiss
6 hours ago
its quite simple.
if you are a profitable company paying taxes, you 100% want to defer taxes (part of EBITDA) thus trade earnings for market share.
This is exactly what TCI did [1] with cable
[1] https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/john-malone-operating-manua...
Believe you're talking about conserving cash through reduced taxes since this guy was against paying taxes.
However, spending a premium on cloud services over what you could with an on-prem capital investment does not help your cash position.
His tenant of frugality would have conflicted, especially since the cloud premium can easily exceed the tax rate - that is to say, paying taxes would have been cheaper
Section in your linked article about frugality https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/john-malone-operating-manua...
In any case, spending on this either opex or capex doesn't help you gain or lose marketshare. Conserving cash can help, so you'd want to employ the lower cost option regardless of what line of the financial statement it hits - it's not going to be cloud if you follow that thought through
If cost was equal then opex gives a tax advantage, most companies are valued on EBITDA so still may not be their priority to optimize tax spend - a lot of other methods to avoid taxes. But the environment I've operated in I choose to capex because it conserves cash (is cheaper) and improves EBITDA optics (is excluded)
Probably depends on where your gross margins would be with cloud and if you're higher or lower growth. If cloud will let you grow faster (HA/DR on-prem is hard) and you'll still have 75-80%+ gross margins, why slow top-line growth to do on-prem?
It’s not a real concern for vast majority of businesses. It’s a common excuse but practically no business is outgrowing a cheaper than cloud solution. Maybe on-prem isn’t right first step, but that doesn’t force you to cloud. There’s dedicated servers and everything in between.
On prem is maybe not the best first step but Colo or dedicated servers gives you a cleaner path to going on-prem if you ever decide to. The cost of growth is too high in cloud.
Learning how to run servers is actually less complicated than all the cloud architecture stuff and doesn’t have to be slower. There’s no one sized fits all, but I believe old boring solutions should be employed first and could be used to run most applications. Technology has a way of getting more complex every year just to accomplish the same tasks. But that’s largely optional.