David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

This is going to be easier.

This is going to be cheaper.

Why are you trying to produce your own power?

Do you have your own power plant?

Why would you do that?

Leave...

the computers to the hyperscalers.

They're much better at it anyway.

I actually thought that was a compelling pitch.

I bought in on that pitch for several years and thought, do you know what?

I'm done ever owning a server again.

We're just going to rend our capacity and Amazon is going to be able to offer us services much cheaper than we could buy them themselves because they're going to have these economies of scale.

And I was thinking,

Jeff's word, my competitor's margin is my opportunity.

That was something he used to drive Amazon.com with, that if he could just make 2% when the other guy was trying to make 4%, he would end up with all the money and on volume, he would still win.

So I thought that was the operating ethos for AWS.

It turns out that's not true at all.

AWS, by the way, operates at almost 40% margin.

So just in that, there's a clue that competitors are not able to do the competitive thing we like about capitalism, which is to lower costs and so forth.

So the cloud pitch in my optics is fundamentally false.