by nosianu | 2025-07-30 17:18:28+00:00
> But relying on other people's kingdom isn't free either

I know it sounds trite, but looking at what I'm responding to, it is not possible to not rely on others for anything but the most basic things where input(s), tool(s), action(s), and output(s) don't require anyone else. You need infrastructure, services, tools, materials provided by others for almost everything.

We are a highly networked species, and building a business is finding a spot in that network. You are always highly connected. Therefore I find that "kingdom" metaphor does not fit how our lives work. It's a network, not kingdoms, not even the richest country could afford to cut the connections.

Services like those from the big companies at least have the advantage that the companies cannot make them too bad, because that would backfire. Copying what most do is pretty safe compared to doing your own thing.

That's also because you want to concentrate on your core business idea. Sure, if you spend some effort doing your basic infrastructure different from others you may save a little, but overall for many companies it will be much better to copy what most others in your space do, so that you have the same basis, and not risk being different in an area that is far from your core competence.

For many areas in business you just hope for the best. You hope(d) Russia-Ukraine would not escalate, or later that it ends quickly. You hope that the latest US tariffs won't be too bad. The world is full of surprises, at least for businesses big company account access or cloud issues does not seem to be a big one, in comparison. I'm not saying this as a headline reader, but as someone dealing with a sanctioned country and other politics-related issues that have been impacting us for a while, despite doing business very far from anything critical (lifestyle consumer products).

We, for example, use one big company to host our DNS (due to history, they also used to host our emails when we began), but we have Microsoft host files (OneDrive) and Email (Office 365) for our entire business domain. I would like to not have to rely on US companies, nor more than ever (we are German), but that stuff just works. And not just as individual pieces, but also together. For example, when I open an Excel file stored in a shared OneDrive folder, and a colleague does the same, we get automatic shared editing and see each other's cursor position. Many small conveniences like that. AND, very important, emails just work - with rarely ever any issues because of rejected emails.

Whenever I see a discussion on reddit or here "why Microsoft (Office)", soooo many people only know the most superficial of arguments. They talk about "but LibreOffice", "but [insert other mail- or cloud file- service), but the apps are not even all that important. It is everything, the huge amount of infrastructure and methods they provide, automatically or manually usable, that ties everything together. The "glue" vastly outshines just Excel or just Word itself, either one of which could indeed be replaced.

When you do more than just simple email, when you have to administer a few dozen employees and their devices, you will find that the big US companies are very hard to beat.

What would be the alternative anyway? Having your own server is a nightmare in comparison! Even just making sure my emails won't be spam-rejected by at least some providers (where my customers and business partners sit) is too much. Making sure the dedicated server is always up to date with patches - that's a lot of work that I'd rather not do. In any case I still have to rely on the hosting provider, who may cut off my wonderful 100% self-owned and administered server at any time because I ended up on some anti-spam list because I did not react to some new threat that I did not even know about in time.

Overall, relying on the big mainstream providers is a prudent choice. You can't avoid trouble, and ceteris paribus choosing them IMHO makes sense.

> You can absolutely build your application without relying on other companies too much.

Obviously, since they do it! I could also bake my own bread. The point is I prefer to specialize and deal with things that don't differentiate me from others in my line of business as little as possible.

I started with computers at a time of 8 bit CPUs, when I knew every relevant memory address by heart. The many many layers these days are not something I enjoy, but I will still use the mainstream stuff nevertheless! Because I am not in the business of basic infrastructure IT and every minute I spend on it is a minute not spent where it actually matters in my business. Everybody, the few dozen employees, the partners, the customers(resellers, they all know the big companies and their products. The only thing we do ourselves is EDI messages on top - on cloud servers. But we sure don't want to come up with OneDrive and Ms Office alternatives, even if politically I'd like that.