Remove Fixed Costs Remove Operations Remove Scaling
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The Cloud is Not a Railroad - An Argument Against the Vertical Separation of Cloud Providers

High Scalability

A Cloud Provider Absorbs Huge Fixed and Sunk Costs. Cloud providers incur huge fixed costs for creating and maintaining a network of datacenters spread throughout the word. The fixed and sunk costs incurred by the cloud provider will dwarf any investment from third party service providers.

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Solving the Internet's Congestion Problem

Harvard Business Review

Congestion, rather than raw usage, is the key driver of this phenomenon; given that the Internet Service Provider network is largely a fixed-cost asset. Like any fixed-cost asset, such as the Interstate highway system in the U.S., it is cheap to operate and expensive to upgrade.

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Joint Ventures Reduce the Risk of Major Capital Investments

Harvard Business Review

In many industries, the capital required to build an asset of minimum efficient scale is growing. For instance, the cost of building and equipping a leading-edge semiconductor fab has climbed to $7 billion, as the technology required to make more advanced chips is getting more complex. Model 1: Virtual operator.

Assets 12
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China’s Slowdown: The First Stage of the Bullwhip Effect

Harvard Business Review

The essence of the phenomenon is the fact that each stage in the supply chain plans its capital projects and operations, including inventory levels, based on its future expectations. Macroeconomic data during the 2008 financial crisis show the bullwhip effect operating on a much broader scale. For example , U.S.

Sales 15
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Telecom's Competitive Solution: Outsourcing?

Harvard Business Review

Bharti's innovative business model converted fixed costs in capital expenditure to a variable cost based on usage of capacity. Through the outsourcing arrangements, Bharti dramatically lowered its costs while ensuring high quality for customers, since vendors had world-class competencies in their domains.

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Health Systems Need to Completely Reassess How They Manage Costs

Harvard Business Review

hospitals and health systems experienced an average 39% reduction in their operating margins from 2015 to 2017. This was because their expenses grew faster than their revenues, despite cost-cutting initiatives. Here are some examples of what will be required to change the operating culture: Contract rationalization. As the U.S.

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How Drucker Thought About Complexity

Harvard Business Review

They have systematically and significantly eroded barriers to entry and movement on a global scale. Thanks to the forces described above, we are more connected on a global scale than ever before. The cost and difficulty of coordinating activities across entities, on a global scale, is far lower now.