The only way a 'truck' could be a liability is a lease for said truck.
There are plenty of economically rationale reasons why a company may own more trucks they strictly need to manage delivery. For example wanting to handle seasonal bursts, wanting to ensure reliability, preparing for an expansion, being able to lease capacity to other businesses.
Actually you can go replace truck with server and you describe what made AWS make initial sense.
Please stop misusing accounting concepts.
Assets can also be liabilities. The mortgages in a mortgage backed security is both an asset and a liability, as was only too well demonstrated in 2008... It's an asset in the security portfolio, but until you sell the security, it's a liability for whomever is securitizing it.
The problem was the market value of those assets plummeted because no one expected them to generate the agreed upon cash flows because the underlying loans were going into correlated defaults. Despite all this the only party that saw the mortgage as a liability is the individual who's responsibility it was to make a monthly payment on said mortgage.
Outside of swaps and other derivatives financial instruments and other properties don't magically switch from being an asset to being a liability based on random external factors.
This conversation is like accountants talking about processes, threads, fibers and context switching... very imprecisely.
I wasn't saying they switch; I'm saying they can be both an asset and a liability. Liability isn't strictly an accounting term. It also can refer to something that acts as a disadvantage. Illiquid assets whose valuation can be volatile can be a liability.
> a person or thing whose presence or behavior is likely to cause embarrassment or put one at a disadvantage.
Code is absolutely a liability. Code deteriorates as conditions change, and unchanged code also becomes more vulnerable in a way that conventional objects can't.
You are describing an operating expense which has an entirely different nature than a liability.
'comes with a maintenance liability' is a handwaving statement that means practically nothing without a ton of contextual information. A true liability has a contractual set of obligations to pay defined amounts on a agreed upon schedule. No one is going to come after you for not changing the oil on your truck, try missing payments on a lease.
Several parties will come after you for not changing the oil on your semi-truck that is being used professionally for freight, starting with your driver, your insurance company, and the US Department of Transportation (DOT), specifically the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), with whom you have m have to provide maintenance records. Trucking is a highly regulated industry, and after Crowdstrike, software engineering is only going to get more regulated, not less.
But does it make sense for a trucking(streaming) company to create own plumbing equipment? I’d rather use Plumbers Supply Inc that every other company uses from Plumber Depot or use open-source-plumbers.com, because I am not in a plumbing business
This describes Google and Amazon perfectly - while you can armchair quarterback their biz decisions they are definitely doing well for themselves.
The whole aws reinvent is repackaged whatever open source project is trending, hiding control plane from the user and instead expose it via AWS control plane and charge people per usage instead of per server
Amazon’s approach is the opposite: steal open source repo and make $$$ off of open source contributors’ labor
As for pay per server vs pay per usage. Heck you know Amazon actually bills the team who caused the cost. And gives finance a report on how much each team is spending and on what. Good luck doing that on prem.
Incentives are everything. That's why managers are so careful when applying them to their own jobs.