Addressing vendor lock-in
Viktor Farcic: Are you concerned at all with vendor lock-in? The idea that companies can basically take over and lock you in forever and ever?
Julian Simpson: I think I'm concerned. I guess as these companies try to differentiate all their services, there will be an inevitable kind of lock-in effect from that. It's obviously in everybody's interest to keep you locked into their platforms. But if they try to sell the same vanilla product, then it's a race to the bottom.
As a result, these companies will try to differentiate things. I mean, if I were a CTO of a company that relied heavily on one cloud platform, I'd be looking to mitigate against that risk; for example, possibly by just running a percentage of my workload elsewhere so that I have the skills to manage a different platform. I think the problem with being able to outsource everything is that you also outsource your skills atrophy, as a person and...
