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The londonbusinessblog.com Top 3
- A surprising turn of events: Paul has the latest news about Amazon, which confirmed another round of layoffs, this time affecting 9,000 people in AWS (see below), Twitch (see Big Tech) and other units. This comes just a few months after Amazon announced 18,000 layoffs. On the AWS section, some colleagues scratched their heads, with Paul writing: “[C]Businesses are looking to cut costs as a result of the economic downturn, which translates into fewer dollars spent on things like cloud computing – even though AWS remains a hugely profitable entity for Amazon.
- Like looking into a crystal ball of startup outputs: PitchBook has a new tool that uses AI to predict which startups will close successfully, Kyle writes. The tool assigns a “probability score” out of 100 and even shows which method the exit can take place.
- OMG AWS: As you read above, AWS took a beating in the latest round of Amazon layoffs, and Ron gives more insight into what happened.
Startups and VC
Bank stocks are reeling this morning in the wake of the UBS-Credit Suisse deal and First Republic’s ongoing woes – and much more besides, in this morning’s extremely excellent episode of our Equity podcast.
On podcasts: The owner of Maximum Fun is selling the podcast company he founded nearly 20 years ago. Instead of turning the network over to a Big Tech company or a media conglomerate, he sells it to his employees, as an employee-owned co-op. Amanda reports.
Do you want more? You are all greedy. But we’re nothing but nice, so good – here’s an omakase menu of treats:
The backlash to the cloud has begun: why big data is pulling compute back to premise
Image Credits: lim_pix / Getty Images
For most of the information age, companies looking to scale invested in server farms and hired huge operations teams to keep them running.
The relatively recent shift to cloud computing promised to reduce costs and increase productivity, but “cloud-first strategies can reach the limits of their effectiveness, and in many cases ROIs are diminishing,” writes Thomas Robinson, COO of Domino Data. Lab.
As “the great repatriation” now happening among public companies also has direct implications for startup DevOps teams, Robinson shares suggestions for “a few things that can be done to ensure future flexibility for where workloads are created.”
Three more from the magnificently magnificent TC+ team:
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Big Tech Inc.
Microsoft is responding to the mobile gaming craze with its own app store. Ivan writes that the software giant is going where Apple and Google have gone before, even counting on some new regulation in the European Union to help its cause, noting that “Microsoft has struggled to create the desired user experience with its Cloud Gaming app on Apple devices because the iPhone maker required users to download every available game to play on Microsoft’s cloud offerings, including Fortnite. That’s why Microsoft is now asking people to sign in through Safari and follow the instructions, which isn’t as simple as downloading an app from the App Store.”
It’s Monday, so as a special treat we have six more for you:
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