Hacker News Reader

Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

The real question is: why aren't they? They had the infrastructure needed to seed a cloud offering 10 years ago. Heck, if Oracle managed to be in 5th (6th? 7th?) place, Facebook for sure could have been a top 5 contender, at least.

View on HN

Because they make more money using their servers for their own products than they would renting them to other people. Meta has an operating margin of 41% AFTER they burn a ton on Reality Labs, while AWS has a 21% margin with more disciplined spending. Social media is a more profitable business than infrastructure.

Does Meta make money from anything other than ads? It's not a dismissive question. I'm curious if social media implies anything other than ads.

> Advertising (over 97.8% of revenues): the company generated over $131 billion in advertising, primarily consisting of displaying ad products on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and third-party.

https://fourweekmba.com/how-does-facebook-make-money/

Because it's not their business, they're not good at it and probably the ROI is not worth it.

Also how exactly they would do it, they don't have enough infra for renting, they would need to x10 what they have now.

because meta sucks at software, documentation and making sure end user products work in a supported way.

Offering reliable IaaS is super hard and capital intensive. Its also not profitable if you are perceived as shit.

>because meta sucks at software

Google started a cloud and their user-facing software is atrocious. Compared e.g. Angular to React, Tensorflow to Pytorch.

Why would you prefer Pytorch to Tensorflow/Keras?

Tensorflow and keras have gotten better, but pytorch historically had better flexibility than keras and was much easier to debug/develop in than tensorflow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com