Correct, but I'd frame it to confused leaders a bit differently. Because we made this part easier, we've increased how critical, how limiting, other steps/functions are. Data's more valuable now. QA is more valuable now. More teams need to shift more resources, faster.
I'm on a meet, in cal, editing a dozen docs, in GCP, pushing commits and launching containers; it's not clear yet what exactly is going on but it's certainly intermittent and sparse, at least so far
I'd guess a reasonable start at delivering near-equivalent capabilities, capacity, and reliability from a standing start today, in just Europe, to be about €50b. The shopping list isn't all that tough. Who wants to pony up?
it's worse than that: nobody knows! how are we supposed to know if all the investment vendor A made in "reliability" of their appliance will actually work, or if it was just spent wastefully? And oops: past results don't reflect future outcomes, so you can't even really bank on a brand or a reputation: who knows if they just cut all Q/A staff? Welcome to entropy my friends!
It's because buying things allows you to see the price of the thing, which means that will be the first and last thing you evaluate: quality is radically harder to quantify, so we resort to evaluating on the thing that comes in an easy quantity. Sellers are thus always incentivized to figure out how to make the price low, since basically all other factors can't be rigorously evaluated until after the sale...
... not quite. I worked directly with the folks involved on getting more RCA details public. This customer used a single product on GCP, a specific type of VMware hosting, and the "subscription" to that product failed, which turned those resources off. It's more like turning off all their VM's, rather than deleting their entire account, identities, access structures, etc.
"make" Mozilla buy it, give em a heaping grant from the Library of Congress to keep the open web open, and be the engine behind every browser keeping things fair... sounds good to me!