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Comment by bitpush | Hacker News Reader

Most companies enter into a contract with Microsoft. That is infinitely better than using a 2 person startup that runs out of a garage. Contracts come with strict terms of service, SLAs, service expectations and such.

If you had a restaurant, would you source your produce from your trusty friend who grows vegetables as a hobby or from an established mega-farming-company?

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Ironically appropriate example. Many of the most famous restaurants in the world, like Noma [1], are famous precisely for sourcing ingredients that bypass mega-farming. At Noma many of the dishes are based on the produce provided from local foraging.

And contrary to what you might expect from its presentation/reputation, the place itself is just a building surrounded by green houses and a guy growing and harvesting most of his own stuff. It's an extreme example, but the issue is fairly typical at nice restaurants.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noma_(restaurant)

Yeah, and many of these best restaurants in the world barely make a profit, compared to Olive Garden or McDonald's.

But yes, I'm with you here. I also like Noma way more than Olive Garden.

Kind of a tangent, but a lot of brick and mortar business is far less profitable than most think. A McDonalds franchise owner is looking at ~$150k/year profit on average. And with lots of other fun stuff like the fact you don't even own the property, it's rented from McDonalds. And that's going to likely trend downward as McDonalds continues to put the squeeze on franchisees and labor costs continue to rise.

And far from passive income, there's a joke that buying a franchise is basically buying a job and not just any job - but a stressful, thankless job with terrible working hours. And the price tag for this new life of luxury starts at around a million dollars.

I like your argument, but McDonald's gets their ingredients from multiple suppliers, all selected for their specific specialism.

They also don't run the cash registers on software provided by their meat supplier.

In Dutch government (especially local), for example, almost everything runs on Microsoft. From e-mail to web sites to chat to internal software. And with AI coming up, Microsoft is effortlessly capturing that market too by including Copilot in existing contracts.

I would sure want to dine in a restaurant were vegetables were grown out of love and not as a profit making machine above all else.

Software from big companies can be made with love too?

I'm not really sure this is true. Big companies find themselves with a big problem by the nature of their own weight. To simply exist they need to see revenue in the millions, if not billions of dollars. So everything rapidly becomes about money. That, in turn, equally rapidly leads to rent-seeking as a goal, which just generally turns everything into a dystopia from inception to production to launch.

but are they? on average? how do you measure this?

it's pretty easy to talk to a solo-dev or gardener

It's easy to talk to Microsoft employees too.

Not in my experience.

Example?

> That is infinitely better than using a 2 person startup that runs out of a garage.

The big advantages with the 2 person startup are

1. A small business a customer who matters to them, and you will get better service

2. You can get terms such as having control of backups, hosting of your choice, and access to systems so you can get someone else to maintain things

> Contracts come with strict terms of service, SLAs, service expectations and such.

How close do these come to covering the consequential losses of an extended outage?

> If you had a restaurant, would you source your produce from your trusty friend who grows vegetables as a hobby or from an established mega-farming-company?

You sure you like this analogy? Every ambitious restaurant (Michelin stars, World's 50 Best, that type) uses small farmers to try obtain higher quality produce.

It's chain restaurants and shitty family restaurants that use the large suppliers.

You go to those restaurants for a boutique experience. You can't run an enterprise based on whatever your suppliers have available on the day.

I was mostly pointing out it's a bad analogy.

That being said, maybe the "small supplier" side of IT is actually OSS + in-house engineers?

No, I'd never use a 2-person startup, that's silly and irresponsible. I'd keep my services in-house and use multiple companies to store backups as I've done for decades—as we all used to do before the renting/leasing software (ripoff) model.

Nor would I ever use software that lives on a remote server that I've no direct control over.

Let's hope Trump does more blocking, it's the only way to wake up a lazy sleepy world.

BTW, isn't 'infinitely' somewhat of an exaggeration?

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