This post was almost angry, now it's just confused

Jez Corden: Jeff Bezos once said the quiet part out loud

Bezos thinks that local PC hardware is antiquated, and that the future will revolve around cloud computing scenarios, where you rent your compute from companies like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.

Corden links to an interview with Bezos where he talks about going to an old brewery and finding it fascinating that the brewery used to do its own power generation since there wasn't a a power grid yet. Here's more of his direct quote from the interview:

I went to a brewery in Luxembourg many years ago now. In fact, this trip was one of the little tiny catalysts for the founding of AWS. And the brewery was 300 years old. This company making beer for 300 years. A lot of the oldest companies in the world are breweries, by the way. I don't know why this is. And they were very proud of their history and they had a museum.

And in that museum, was an electric power generator, 100 years old. Because when they wanted to improve the efficiency of their brewery with electricity, there was no power grid, so they had to build their own power station. So they made their own electricity. And at that time, that's what everybody did. If a hotel wanted electricity, they had their own electric generator.

And I looked at this, and I thought, this is what computation is like today, everybody has their own data center. And that's not gonna last. It makes no sense. You're gonna buy compute off the grid. That's AWS.

Put another way in a trending post on mastodon.social:

Jeff Bezos is saying the quiet part out loud. They want to kill local computing.

You will own nothing and be happy. You will rent your computing power from the cloud. You pay a subscription for the privilege of using a computer.

So, I almost published a completely different version of this post. I was all set to go, scheduled to publish, but at the last second, I thought I should probably watch a bit more of the interview myself, just to get the full context of what Bezos actually said. After all, the original article claimed he was "saying the quiet part out loud" and the Mastodon post said he wanted "to kill local computing". I figured I should probably double-check, just in case.

Honestly, my takeaway from the interview is completely different.

The core of Bezos's argument, as I understood it, was creating a parallel between electricity distribution and data center distribution, specifically in the context of AWS and why he thought that worked for data centers. At no point did he mention personal computers, and he certainly didn't express any desire to move all customer data to his cloud. The explicit text of his words was that AWS solved the problem of every business needing its own physical server farm. AWS offered a different solution, one that has been quite successful and convenient on the whole.

I suspect the counter argument is that, "well, he implied he wanted to kill local computing!" Maybe that's what he meant, but to me, that's like hearing someone say they like dogs and replying, "oh, so you hate cats?" It feels like an unwarranted extrapolation of the point to get him to have said what you want to be angry about.

Anyway, I encourage you to watch the interview yourself and see what you think. The portion we're discussing starts around the 51-minute mark.