Hey, you make a lot of great points and thanks for the perspective and depth of engagement. I think “paying vendors for services you don’t want to run internally” is exactly outsourcing. With the ubiquity of big cloud services though, I hesitate to call that outsourcing even though it fits that definition. Maybe cause that’s more about the hardware than the people, I dunno. I checked real quick and seems like they do have their own data centers but use AWS and others as well around the world.

I think I may have a different default definition of outsourcing than others though after working tech support in the US for bigger companies through other smaller outsourced companies in the US. A lot of people probably assumed I meant overseas as in outsourced tech support to India. I agree with your scaling estimates and most everything else you said. Someone’s gotta design dem summer sale logos too though lol. Cheers.