Azure's success as a cloud provider is mostly a result of their sales team and having an existing relationship with non-technical leadership. "We already pay them for Office and Exchange, let's just buy this new 'cloud' thing from them too".

Azure is barely considered an option at all within tech companies, yet is surprisingly widely adopted by non-technical companies that don't know any better (ie, that don't have a technical / engineering voice or representation within leadership).

AWS = Likely technically the best, for now. Mostly unreasonable pricing, and less motivation to seriously negotiate given they are the 'default' cloud provider for most of the industry. Kind of feels like they have peaked though, and are slipping more recently. Inevitable, or bad leadership changes?

OCI = New-comer, attractive pricing and hungry for business. Might be able to avoid mistakes other providers have made? Reliability struggles though. Parent company has a bad reputation in some circles - but probably not with decision makers. Making huge (unwise?) investments - that will either come crashing down in 5 years, or seriously pay off. Layoffs, but going for massive growth...huh?

GCP = Notably different underlying technical choices than other providers. Folks are maybe a bit less pragmatic, and more academic. This helps them in unique services (Spanner?) but hurts in most other areas. They've matured, and are btwn AWS and OCI in reliability. They are probably not as hungry for business as they should be given how far behind they are.

The precipitous decline was already happening long before LLM's dealt the final blow.

Even with the new Central Subway that opened in SF (which I assume cost billions given how long it took to develop), wasn't a clear net-win. Muni closed other Metro routes when those opened. Depending on where you're going, you might be worse off now.

While RTO may be increasing ridership numbers, Covid did change population and commuting dynamics. Transit orgs need to adapt, and maybe accept downsizing / focusing more on a smaller scope. In Bart's case, maybe it would be wiser to focus on the core Bart system, and not the more recent expansions (the East Bay trains that are totally separate from the rest of Bart, and the Oakland airport train). Maybe a stronger look should be taken at merging the disparate transit organizations themselves, to reduce administrative overhead?

Caltrain seems to be doing better than others - they have financing worries themselves, but are on a better track from my understanding. Pun semi-intended :)

Transit is important, and I feel like the current organizations keep letting us down.

Re: the concerns over "immigrants taking our jobs!". As a native-born American working in a large tech company today - the threat is very clearly not from H1B's and other visas. The threat to American tech jobs is when US tech companies choose to build out offices in lower cost of living countries (and I'm very much including Europe in that, I think that's even a bigger problem).

It's much much better for America if tech companies hire workers in the US, regardless of whether they are citizens. Americans are eligible for those jobs, and that money stays within our economy. Versus employing workers elsewhere, where American's can't easily be hired, and those resources leave the US.

If we want to keep opportunities here - that's the issue we should be focus on fixing. What regulatory steps could we advocate for that would address this risk? Immigration is the wrong problem, and the focus on that in certain populist circles really demonstrates they are rather out of touch from what's actually happening in the industries that are driving the US economy today.