And therein lies the problem. As long as people are unwilling to pay for services, the winning services will always be the most predatory ones that make their money by selling their users to other companies.
That's like saying "Cars are a marketing term for internal combustion engines."
Clouds give you software-definable load balancers, networking, clustering, integrated systemwide security, and a boatload of managed services like message queues, databases, AI training and inference, etc. etc.
No-one sane implements all that using a collection of VPSes, because of a simple principle of business: it's more profitable to focus investment on your core competencies, and for almost all companies, managing a non-trivial computing infrastructure is decidedly not a core competency.
The fizzling of OS/2 was as much IBM's fault as anything. If they'd paid more attention to it sooner, MS might never have shipped Windows; they'd just have made their office applications OS/2 GUI programs. But IBM was too fixated on its mainframes to realize that they were giving away the PC market to MS (again--they did it the first time by licensing DOS to MS).
Before Facebook, I used Friendster. Years later, I read how Friendster execs were too busy patting themselves on the back and flying around on private jets to get around to fixing the horrendous site lag of sometimes a minute to even sign into the web app. How could a company's leadership be so foolish? I understood this paled in comparison to the doomed arrogance of IBM's leaders when I read stories about IBM's downfall in the delightful book In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters.
Wait, did IBM license DOS to Microsoft? I thought IBM was looking for an operating system for the PC and approached Kildall about CP/M. That deal fell through, so they approached Microsoft. Gates didn't have anything, so he licensed QDOS for a song and licensed it to IBM.
I was being somewhat sloppy. IBM bought DOS from Microsoft for the IBM PC--but neglected to buy exclusive rights to it, so Microsoft could and did sell it on its own as MS-DOS. (And later, other vendors began selling their own versions.) For PC users, this was a great deal, since it effectively made the IBM PC an open standard. But it meant that IBM captured much less value from DOS and PCs than Microsoft did.
If your quote were true, then by the Randian logic of the people who make such claims, they must deserve to do so and you shouldn't have any issue with it.
But your quote certainly isn't true if you're actually talking about "the world". For example, Japan and China are the two largest holders of US Treasury bonds. China controls roughly 50% of the the contracted construction market in Africa. These are just examples of the sort of thing you'd need to take into account in trying to justify your silly racist claim.
> ... against the actual work their company cares about doing. [...] stuff that matters
This is a key point. Some engineers are having fun doing e.g. greenfield stuff with AI that they never would have had time for otherwise. Whether the company cares about that is another question.
It's related to Goodhart’s Law. If AI token usage is a target, then you're going to get a lot of token usage, but it's not likely to correlate well to improved business outcomes.
It comes from EU law. E.g. Council Regulation No 269/2014 defines economic resources as "assets of every kind, whether tangible or intangible, movable or immovable, which are not funds but may be used to obtain funds, goods or services." (https://finance.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2020-06/200619-opi...)
If the program design follows the principle of making illegal states unrepresentable (credit to Yaron Minsky), the compiler can catch much, much more than most people realize.
The process of designing a program like that itself catches a lot of "badly designed code". And such a design also naturally exposes many kinds of intentional backdoors, because security properties can quite easily be statically checked. For example, IDORs can be made literally impossible in such a design.
In discussions like this, I'm reminded of the William Gibson quote, "the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed."
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