FYI: This is a rant.

This is something I've been thinking about for a few days. Every couple weeks or so on the Timcast show, Ian Crossland will sperg out and insist that sites like Facebook and Goggle and AWS should be compelled to give up the code.

This has always infuriated me. Not because I have a problem with open source (I happen to like open source), but rather because it strikes me as him, as a self proclaimed "cofounder of minds.com"... as being incredibly lazy as well as reflecting how little he actually knows about the web middleware space.

The "secret" of Facebook is 100% network effect. Any half competent app design team could hammer out Facebook's UI in a quarter, and some have. There is nothing about "the code" that is special. It's just pure network effect.

Google... once upon a time involved a bit of secret sauce in indexing, but nowadays they TOO are largely just network effect (this time from the advertisers).

But then there's AWS. That must be secret sauce in the code, right?

Well, no. And really AWS is the most interesting of the three because this is a fight that's been going on for fifty years, namely, mainframes vs boxes. It's a fight that's seen reversals of fortunes and the only certainty is that the current king will always be dethroned.

AWS doesn't do anything "new". Conceptually everything it does in hosting and running code can be traced back to products that IBM and Oracle and Unisys have been selling since the 80's (and in IBM's case, even longer). But AWS managed to strike a nerve because in the 00's the mainframes were getting pretty fucking obtuse about how difficult they were to set up and maintain.

People who think that AWS is somehow an undefeatable singularity are naive. In ten years, AWS will be what WebSphere was ten years ago, and the new hotness will be something that does everything it does but in an on-prem, physical package that can be amortized.