"Question. For many years, you’ve been trying to get U.S. technology companies to process the data of European citizens according to EU standards. Is that possible with Trump in the White House?
Answer. A legal system has to be stable precisely in situations where you have a crazy president. If everyone were nice and friendly, we wouldn’t need laws. A big issue is how much the whole data economy has become part of this trade war. One of the only things that Europe can retaliate [against] is going to be the digital industry. It’s one of the things where [Americans] make shitloads of money. It’s the financial industry, digital industry… and that’s about it.
The [EU] Commission just fined Meta and Apple… and the former responded with a very Trumpian press release, saying, “Oh, this is a tariff.” You broke the law and you knew you were doing it, so now you can’t just say it’s a tariff. It’s like someone driving their Porsche at 180 miles an hour and, when they get fined, they say, “Oh, you just hate rich people.”
Q. Is the European Commission right to fine two tech giants in the middle of a tariff war?
A. The EC is taking things slowly, because it doesn’t want to be the first to throw a stone. But at some point, you have to enforce your law. We must address the issue of technological dependence. In the U.S., there’s even been talk of American companies not offering their services in Greenland and Denmark. It’s crazy, because then no one would trust those companies again… but we also thought no one would ever start a trade war."
But it is someone else’s computer, that unlike your computer, is shared by many users and used at nearly 100% capacity. You pay for your whole computer but maybe use 1% of its capacity (that’s generous). So the time to pay off the cost of the hardware should be at least 100x faster with the cloud, and cost of electricity is relatively minor compared to hardware.
The other advantage they have is economies of scale. If you paid $300 for the CPU in your computer, a cloud provider is probably getting similar performance for $100-200 due to buying thousands of units.
Those benefits existed long before in VPS-es.
What I understand that was new as the marketing terminology shifted to “cloud” is that the provider not solely provided you the virtualized hardware with a stock OS. They would also manage typical software like nodejs, database, elasticsearch, queue, … Along with the annoying stuff like updates and backups.
Basically reduce the amount of work invested in the ops part of devops.