What makes you say it is a bad business decision? It seems to be a fine decision to make for things like AWS, since when it goes down, a ton of websites go down and no one blames the site.
There is no way to know whether it is a good or bad business decision just because they can go down when a third party goes down. For example, if you save $50 million a year by firing half your employees and replacing them with AI, but you lose $10 million a year because your site goes down when Claude goes down, then you made a great business decision.
Oddly, I do not think you are wrong. In a pure money calculus exercise, this seems like a no brainer. Naturally, the math gets iffy the moment we are trying to capture something less tangible like 'customer may get sufficiently annoyed to drop us altogether' or 'we are no longer a respected company' or what MBAs would call 'unexpected goodwill extraction'.
I honestly don't care nearly as much as I used to, because I used to be more upset over this. Now, I simply wait to see how much is enough to rile up average Joe and Jenna.
On the other hand a competitor site that is up (or bricks and mortar competitors) might get a lot of business when AWS goes down. If you depend on AWS for operations it might be a lot more expensive than that.
Mostly I think its that management does not blame the person who picks AWS. Its another iteration of "no one got fired for buying IBM/Microsoft".
It is also an issue at other levels: if all a county's businesses rely on AWS (let alone its government) then that gives the US huge leverage over you (sanctions would shut down your economy).
This is exactly my point, though. I was simply stating that you can't be sure it is a bad business decision just because it goes down sometimes. It isn't immediately obvious from that single fact whether the business decision is good or bad, it is simply one factor to consider. Occasional downtime isn't an immediate business killer for every business.
That would require AWS to actually be down a lot, and it’s not. Betting your business on AWS being flakier than whatever alternative provider you use is probably not a good idea.
No it would not require that. Suppose you are one of 10 competitors. The others all use AWS.
Your system is down as often as AWS. When you are down your lost sales are shared between 10 of them. When AWS is down you get all their lost sales.
Obviously very simplified, but you get the point. There might be a huge gain in being up when others are down.
> Betting your business on AWS being flakier than whatever alternative provider you use is probably not a good idea.
You are not betting your business on it. You are betting the consequences of downtime only.
AWS does not seem to be all that high reliability out of the box. You can use multiple availability zones etc. but you can do the equivalent elsewhere.
hundreds (thousands?) of companies who based their business on capabilities built around someone else's API. Companies that had important features stop working because a company's API terms and conditions changed. Were you not around for this?
There is no way to know whether it is a good or bad business decision just because they can go down when a third party goes down. For example, if you save $50 million a year by firing half your employees and replacing them with AI, but you lose $10 million a year because your site goes down when Claude goes down, then you made a great business decision.