It's quite funny in a way: regular mail worked for two hundred or so years without too much in terms of trouble, ok, we had some spam but that was about it. And now mail delivery has become so complicated that the mere act of accepting mail can lead to your corporate secrets being made public or lifted without your knowledge.
But you can still send it if you want that kind of security. There’s trade offs galore, but obviously the cheapness and convenience of email seems to have won out versus security concerns.
Email cam be copied and sent wherever without the operators knowledge, from anywhere with internet, if they break into the mail daemon.
In the digital world there is no such sentry.
Also, at some point the cloud provider may figure out that they can increase profitability by hiring more and more below-average people and just market them as world-class.
What I described is a situation of basically converting reputation into cash. Once you're known for having "armies of above-average developers" and then cut back on employee quality, it's going to take a long time for the market to figure it out (and you can probably extend that time significantly with slick marketing). In the mean time, you profit margins are increased.
In part, this is the different service model: if I go to AWS and buy, say, S3 they have a very clear responsibility not to lose your data and to serve it quickly. If my CIO picks one of the bargain basement outsourcers and the centralized storage service fails badly, each different group will be saying that the failure wasn’t due to them but the company management, outsourced project management, the contractors who set it up/operate/monitor/secure, vendor products, vendor professional staff, Microsoft, etc. Since truckloads of cash will have been spent by then, many of those parties only care if it’ll reach the point of a lawsuit and everyone in the approval chain who didn’t say it was troubled before has an incentive to say the failure was unforeseeable and the solution is not to hold anyone accountable.
Besides, it’s not really true today that clouds only employ “above average” developers. I mean hell, they employed me!
When you proceed to the logical end of enforcing simplicity to achieve security, you get OpenBSD. That's great for certain applications, but I think we can agree it doesn't check a lot of boxes for contemporary feature set demands.
My point being, achieving that is way harder than it sounds.
Speaking of OpenBSD, that might actually be a better OS for most stuff on the shop floor in companies that I have seen from the inside, where Windows is used almost exclusively. The plus being, nobody can really mess around with it. There is usually exactly one app that needs to run 24/7/365 with occasional opportunity to update e.g. during a maintenance window and that's it, anything that causes the app to close is lost time on the shop floor. OpenBSD being minimal is a large plus here.
Let’s say you are a big airline company, there is absolutely not a single reason you should manage your email system. Your job is to fly airplanes not to manage some goddam emails.
The really fun part in that is that most of the big airlines actually outsourced some key part of their core job (IT wise I mean), like how they manage seats and load, this kind of stuff, while keeping some absolute non-core IT services internal, like an internal Exchange system with dozens and dozens of people to manage it.
The state where big companies are make the second option impossible. That may be unfortunate, I don’t know, but that’s really where we’re at.
There is absolutely no way to cure big companies from all the shit they have accumulated. For them, the actual restart is to go to Cloud. Hopefully they will not go simply bare metal, because then they can recreate the exact same shit but in the Cloud.