Snowflake employee here, not speaking on behalf of the company.
Short version is that you would think so, but it doesn't work that way for at least two reasons.
1. If we weren't investing in product optimization, but our competitors were, we'd quickly be outpaced.
2. When we invest in optimizing queries for our customers, the ROI on the Snowflake investment goes up. This results in actually getting even more money than if we just didn't bother, because CFOs that see great ROI on an investment absolutely do not hesitate to throw more funding at that investment. Making the denominator smaller is a really fast way to make the ROI higher.
So while the incentive seems to be perverse on first glance, very quickly it becomes clear that this isn't the case on further analysis.
Was a heavy Snowflake user at my last company - and this is what we saw.
Plenty of profiling tools to show why a query was taking a certain amount of time allowed us to optimise things, and also, the product seemed to get quicker over time.
Also love that, unlike BigQuery, you charge by compressed data size, not uncompressed data size.
The next day, it looks like BigQuery started charging by compressed data size.
Any opinions on Adobe bringing back perpetual licenses? Or... do you have any stock tips?
Short version is that you would think so, but it doesn't work that way for at least two reasons.
1. If we weren't investing in product optimization, but our competitors were, we'd quickly be outpaced.
2. When we invest in optimizing queries for our customers, the ROI on the Snowflake investment goes up. This results in actually getting even more money than if we just didn't bother, because CFOs that see great ROI on an investment absolutely do not hesitate to throw more funding at that investment. Making the denominator smaller is a really fast way to make the ROI higher.
So while the incentive seems to be perverse on first glance, very quickly it becomes clear that this isn't the case on further analysis.