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Comment by mohaine | Hacker News Reader

Where I work the answer is most certainly a YES. We have so much stuff using non-portable cloud offerings that switching would be a nightmare. (Step Functions, Lambda, SQS) Sure we could switch to replacements but the cost and time would be prohibitive.

At some point most large companies will play their hand and raise prices to more closely match the cost of switching off the platform. (i.e. the MO of Oracle/IBM) It is really more a matter of when, not if. The problem with doing this is customers wise up this strategy and quit using your products for most new work. Once this happens, the company's best option for growth is to buy new users via acquisition.

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I don't see Google allowing this to happen, they will try to offer lower prices/extras because they need to make up for lost time and market share to leaders AWS and Microsoft who are quickly pulling away as the 2 leaders in the market.

Google has enough resources to accommodate any medium/large enterprises that want to switch through price and onboarding incentives. Not to mention they employ many of the world's Kubernetes developers, experts, and maintainers.

The holy trinity has enough cash and willpower to keep a monopoly/monopolistic pricing from happening and there's enough business for them outside of the cloud to encourage them not to collude IMO.

Not to say hybrid cloud architectures are unnecessary - they most certainly are good, and the way the industry is moving, I just don't think there will be a huge pain point over monopolistic pricing/actions.

It doesn't really matter that Google does.

Sure it might be cheaper to use a competitor but if it will cost us 10M to migrate and test the working production workflow then it would have to be 10M cheaper to switch.

This gives our current provider a strong incentive to charge us a bit extra. Say 1/4 the price of the migration. Nobody wants to start a high risk migration that would take 4 years to pay for itself. Easier to just keep paying 2.5M extra. Safer that way and it isn't their money anyway.

But cloud software will continue to come (and go) rapidly, and Google would snap up the new customers in the frothy market.

AWS would have to be certain that these losses weren't more than their up-priced gains

> At some point most large companies will play their hand and raise prices to more closely match the cost of switching off the platform. (i.e. the MO of Oracle/IBM)

I don't see AWS doing this. They've continuously implemented technology improvements that have allowed them to reduce costs for customers 67 times in the last 10 years. The price of cloud services always goes down, not up, over time, as you're able to realize the benefits of improvements in compute power for the same cost (Moore's Law) without upgrading hardware.

Disclaimer: I work for AWS, but my opinions are my own.

You are thinking like a software engineer, not a product manager or owner of capital.

If any of these companies is able to extract monopoly profits without fear of competition undercutting them or government/legal intervention, they will.

Right now all 3 are competing fiercely to win the hardware rental market, but this may not be the case in the future once the market matures, and they may raise prices to match leaving costs (as parent comment pointed out) if they can lock customers in.

I have to +1 this.

The price must always go up over time. If there were a first rule of business, that would be that.

Price decrease is just a longer term strategy where it goes down before it goes up.

The amount of implicit absurdity behind your words is astonishing. Basically outside die-hard Marxists nobody takes such claims seriously, because it implies lack of competition.

Hint: the cloud market has PLENTY of competition.

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