Comment by StealthyStart

Comment by StealthyStart 2 days ago

14 replies

This is the real cause. At the enterprise level, trust outweighs cost. My company hires agencies and consultants who provide the same advice as our internal team; this is not to imply that our internal team is incorrect; rather, there is credibility that if something goes wrong, the decision consequences can be shifted, and there is a reason why companies continue to hire the same four consulting firms. It's trust, whether it's real or perceived.

raw_anon_1111 2 days ago

I have seen it much more nuanced than that.

2020 - I was a mid level (L5) cloud consultant at AWS with only two years of total AWS experience and that was only at a small startup before then. Yet every customer took my (what in hindsight might not have been the best) advice all of the time without questioning it as long as it met their business goals. Just because I had @amazon.com as my email address.

Late 2023 - I was the subject matter expert in a niche of a niche in AWS that the customer focused on and it was still almost impossible to get someone to listen to a consultant from a shitty third rate consulting company.

2025 - I left the shitty consulting company last year after only a year and now work for one with a much better reputation and I have a better title “staff consultant”. I also play the game and be sure to mention that I’m former “AWS ProServe” when I’m doing introductions. Now people listen to me again.

0xWTF 2 days ago

Children do the same thing intuitively: parents continually complain that their children don't listen to them. But as soon as someone else tells them to "cover their nose", "chew with their mouth closed", "don't run with scissors", whatever, they listen and integrate that guidance into their behavior. What's harder to observe is all the external guidance they get that they don't integrate until their parents tell them. It's internal vs external validation.

  • raw_anon_1111 2 days ago

    Or in many cases they go over to their grandparents house and they let them run wild and all of the sudden your parents have “McDonald’s money” for their grandkids when they never had it for you.

    • [removed] a day ago
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coliveira 2 days ago

So much worse for American companies. This only means that they will be uncompetitive with similar companies that use models with realistic costs.

  • raw_anon_1111 2 days ago

    I can’t think of a single major US company that is big internationally that is competing on price.

    • ipaddr 2 days ago

      Any car company. Uber.

      All tech companies offering free services.

      • raw_anon_1111 2 days ago

        Is a “cheaper” service going to come along and upend Google or Facebook?

        I’m not saying this to insult the technical capabilities of Uber. But it doesn’t have the economics that most tech companies have - high fixed costs and very low marginal costs. Uber has high marginal costs saving a little on inference isn’t going to make a difference.

      • jamiek88 2 days ago

        What American car company competes overseas on price?

        • necovek a day ago

          All the American cars (Ford, Chevrolet, GM...) are much cheaper in Europe than eg. German cars from their trifecta (and other Europe-made high end vehicles from eg Sweden, Italy or UK), and on par with mid-priced vehicles from the likes of Hyundai, Kia, Mazda...

          Obviously, some US brands do not compete on price, but other than maybe Jeep and Tesla, those have a small market penetration.

    • re-thc a day ago

      > I can’t think of a single major US company that is big internationally that is competing on price.

      All the clouds compete on price. Do you really think it is that differentiated? Google, Amazon and Microsoft all offer special deals to sign big companies up and globally too.

      • raw_anon_1111 a day ago

        I worked inside AWS consulting department for 3 years (AWS ProServe) and now I work as a staff consultant for a 3rd AWS partner. I have been on enough sales calls, seen enough go to market training materials and flown out to customers sites to know how these things work. AWS has never tried to compete as the “low cost leader”. Marketing 101 says you never want to compete on price if you can avoid it.

        Microsoft doesn’t compete on price. Their major competitive advantage is Big Enterprise is already big into Microsoft and it’s much easier to get them to come onto Azure. They compete on price only when it comes to making Windows workloads Bd SQL Server cheaper than running on other providers.

        AWS is the default choice for legacy reasons and it definitely has services an offerings that Google doesn’t have. I have never once been on a sales call where the sales person emphasizes that AWS is cheaper.

        As far as GCP, they are so bad at evterprise sales, we never really looked at them as serious competition.

        Sure AWS will throw credits in for migrations and professional services both internally and for third party partners. But no CFO is going to look at just the short term credits.