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Comment by angersock | Hacker News Reader

The interesting thing, to me, isn't so much what'll happen to the employees--it's what's going to happen to all the SaaS and PaaS folks the remaining startups depend on.

When everyone and their buddy is signing up to spew cash into the coffers of services like Amazon, Heroku, and other hosted solutions (instead of doing it themselves), those services can spread and grow.

What happens, though, when that easy cash is no longer available? What happens when, for example, paying a lot for Docker or NPM no longer makes sense?

The outflux of customers has the--in some sense--real possibility of killing those businesses for the remaining users. Look at Github, for example, as a company trying to run ahead of the curve--it can happen.

I'm more concerned with what happens to ecosystems, like Node, that have VC-fueled companies as critical components.

I'd love to hear other opinions on this point of view.

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That's a very good question. My guess is that we might see an implosion or two, but I highly doubt we'll ever see a struggling b2b SaaS company cause serious problems for its former users when it goes out of business.

If a company could inflict so much damage in the broader ecosystem by when it goes out of then it can charge high prices for what it offers. As a general rule if you're providing something people sttruggle to function without. then you can always stay in business if you want.

Of course, there are edge cases involving mismanagement, but I suspect they're extremely rare.

Perhaps what might be more likely would be acquisitions where the acquiring company kills the service for some reason - like what happened with Parse.

who pays for npm?

You begin to see the problem. :|

More seriously, they're trying to move into the enterprise/private space--but they took on a hell of a lot of funding to accomplish that. Not looking great for the good guys.

A very interesting point! Cloud services cost tons of money. For companies running on AWS, a better alternative might be to migrate to Google Cloud or alter cheaper alternatives. Google Cloud lacks some bells and whistles at this point but it shaves off 50% of your AWS bill.

Do you work for GCE? You've made this exact same comment twice on the same link. Do you have any examples or links that back up the 50% cheaper point? As well as the trade-offs for switching to GCE? We run on GCE, Heroku, and AWS.

No, I don't work at Google. I work for Monsanto. Here is my take on AWS vs Google: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/10O1YeNpPjylHLugEz8GI...

Performance benchmark summary: ("1X" is AWS)

Compute:

VMs Price: 30% less

Boot time: ¼ X

Network between VMs: Same region: 4X Across regions: 10X

BigQuery vs Redshift : ½ -20X

Big Data (Hadoop and Spark): 3X

Disks: Read throughput: 1X Write throughput: 4X (Ephemeral); 2X (Persistent)

Local SSDs: Read throughput: 8X Writes throughput: 4X

Storage (S3): Throughput: 2X Latency: 3X (initial); ½ X (for subsequent reads)

Monsanto is actively damaging the future agricultural possibilities of the entire world with their business practices and how they sell their seeds. Creating seeds that we can way over dose with poison?

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