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Comment by kybernetyk | Hacker News Reader

> why they can't just drop $500mm to $2b on buying one or more competent saas/ops companies to get some real expertise in house

I don't know. Look at how huge iCloud and the iTunes store are. Every iOS device sold uses those services. They'd need to buy twitter or facebook to get people that are experts on that scale.

If you take the scale into account I don't think that their web services are 'crapware' - especially for a company where those services are only complementary to their main products.

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It doesn't have to be a consumer service; they could buy Akamai or really any decent sized CDN, any of a bunch of network carriers, managed hosting providers, etc. Apple's stuff is all really easy to shard/partition, so it's nowhere near the technical challenge something like Facebook is, where it's largely one big monolithic thing with lots of interconnection. (I wouldn't be suggesting Twitter as a source of amazing ops/security talent, in particular.) Or they could buy Canonical or Red Hat or SUSE, or to stay BSD, iXSystems. Twilio or Github also probably have a high level of ops/tech competence vs. cost to acquire, even if they're dealing with a smaller userbase currently. Valve would be another obvious one.

Jobs was right -- in 10 years, iCloud is going to be central to the success or failure of Apple. There's no way I'd pick Apple based solely on iCloud so far; it's markedly inferior to what Google has put together, and actually basically inferior to what a modernized RIM BES could have been.

Canonical? To learn from the experience with Ubuntu forums?

Yeah, that one's weak -- I wanted to say Debian, but they're not a commercial company.

As far as I'm concerned, the gold standard for developer relations, including high-dollar/enterprise customer support, (at least at a large company) is Microsoft. It would probably be politically infeasible for Apple to license MSDN though.

Which is weird, because back in the 1980s (and maybe early 1990s, still), Apple was pretty awesome for developer relations. I only faintly remember it (I had Macs from 1985 at school, and from 1990 at home, and only did the most basic of stuff with ResEdit and checked out the books from the library), but stuff like their UI/UX guidelines were way ahead of their time.

>> If you take the scale into account I don't think that their web services are "crapware"

What "scale" has to do with "crap" ? Considering both vertical and horizontal scaling - there is possibility that "crap" can be scaled too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalability

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