Last week, news broke out of Apple’s “McQueen” project; a plan to move Apple’s iCloud data away from Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, etc. and into its own data centres.
This isn’t really a surprise or an insidious plan by Apple to damage its competitors. It’s obvious if you think about what the benefit of outsourcing is for any company.
Companies outsource if;
1. The technology is not a core strength of the company.
2. The technology will not be a key differentiator going forward.
3. There are cost benefits (mostly due to scale) of outsourcing.
In the case of Apple, cloud infrastructure was not a core strength of the company so it made sense to outsource at the onset. However, it became clear that the cloud would be a key differentiator going forward. Additionally, the scale of Apple’s cloud operations became huge, and hence the cost benefits of outsourcing became negative.
The only thing that was surprising to me was the fact that Apple was outsourcing at all. I would have thought that Apple had had everything in house years ago.
Naofumi Kagami 