# What do you believe now that you didn't five years ago? Centralized wins. Decentralized loses. - High Scalability

<http://highscalability.com/blog/2018/8/22/what-do-you-believe-now-that-you-didnt-five-years-ago-centra.html>

- Host: [highscalability.com](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/hosts/highscalability.com/)
- Saved: August 28, 2018 (2018-08-29T04:14:05Z)
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- JSON: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/76348e657513.json

## What Jamie wrote

There is much truth in this article, even though it’s a little hard for me to like it.

> What's more, consumers simply do not care. Users use. Only a small percentage have the technical sophistication to understand why they may want to preferentially use decentralized applications for technical reasons. Saying "It's like X, but decentralized", does not resonate, especially when the services are not as good. We had decentralized Slack way before Slack...yet there's Slack. You know it's bad when GitHub managed to recentralize an inherently distributed system like git. 

Unfortunately you could say the exact same paragraph and replace "centralized" with "private".

This article reminded me of one of my most memorable conversations I had with a venture capital friend, [Michael Gorman](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mbgorman/). We were talking about the Internet and I commented that "the Internet prefers decentralization". On one level, a very technical one, that is true. The Internet is a massively distributed system. It can suffer significant outages without having total network failure. But I was mistakenly extending that concept to things being built on the Internet. Michael replied that he saw nothing to support that, that the Internet was full of "winner take all" businesses, with complete centralization and not even room for a 2nd place. He was absolutely right.

## Facts

- Kind: [Page](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/kinds/page/)

## Appears in

- [WT69: Weekly Thing #69 / Sep 1, 2018](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/69/), Featured Links 🏅

## Same host

- [Google's Transition from Single Datacenter, to Failover, to a Native Multihomed Architecture - High Scalability -](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/55dd8351fdd0/) (highscalability.com, February 23, 2016)
- [The QuickBooks Platform - High Scalability -](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/94ff1b840303/) (highscalability.com, November 7, 2016)
- [The Always On Architecture - Moving Beyond Legacy Disaster Recovery - High Scalability -](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/8a9680d9ede2/) (highscalability.com, June 2, 2017)
- [Google's New Book: The Site Reliability Workbook - High Scalability](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/59761ad38c6e/) (highscalability.com, July 26, 2018)
- [A Short on How Zoom Works - High Scalability](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/1dcfe0e174fb/) (highscalability.com, May 21, 2020)

## Saved the same week

- [Internet chat system IRC turns thirty | University of Oulu](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/b5b9a75e3da1/) (oulu.fi, August 28, 2018)
- [Stop Using WhatsApp If You Care About Your Privacy](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/06b815e11a32/) (lifehacker.com, August 28, 2018)
- [How Facebook, Apple and Microsoft are contributing to an openly licensed map of the world – The ODI](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/b3eb88614c29/) (theodi.org, August 28, 2018)
- [Is It Okay to Say “Hey Guys”? - The Atlantic](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/9a807d499b77/) (theatlantic.com, August 28, 2018)
- [Why use GraphQL, good and bad reasons · Honest Engineering](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/145946bb854a/) (honest.engineering, August 28, 2018)

## Elsewhere

- Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://highscalability.com/blog/2018/8/22/what-do-you-believe-now-that-you-didnt-five-years-ago-centra.html