> The whole scenario only exists because of the axiom introduced between points 3 and 5...
I'll argue that the higher-level context introduced in point 2 is even more important here: "ORG shifts from assume we have infinite budget mode to we need to break even next year or we’ll die" i.e. the whole scenario exists not because the business can't accurately evaluate TCO, it's because the business is in do-or-die mode and long-term TCO doesn't matter NOW.
That is, this whole scenario takes place in a situation where there is a organizationally vital need to cut costs. What happens afterwards is a trade of long-term risk (internalizing an essential business function and giving it a bus factor of one) for immediate financial improvement (no more SaaS spend). Long-term TCO doesn't matter if the company collapses next quarter, right?
And in that short-term frame, the project is an unqualified success: X10 delivers exactly what was needed, and the SaaS spend is eliminated. But the risk hits: X10 leaves the company.
[So, pointing out this hypothetical company isn't correctly estimating TCO is correct, but irrelevant; they're in a position where having to pay the long term costs will be a better problem than the one they have now - a reasonable business decision, though not a great one to have to make.]
For what it's worth, I completely agree with your original point: organizations really do systemically underestimate the total cost of ownership of a service. Within the example in the article, the flawed assumption is pretty explicitly laid out in point 7: "For all intents and purposes, development is done, they only need to keep the lights on." - and exploring WHY this assumption is flawed is the core of the article (section 3).
So, ultimately I agree with dambi0 in the GP comment - the lede hasn't been buried here, rather the whole article is a discussion of one aspect of the very point you make. Why DO organizations systematically underestimate service TCO? Because, at least in part, there is not yet a widespread understanding that a service is not "software" in and of itself; rather, a service is the organizational understanding of a solution to an organizational problem domain, and maintaining organizations is orders of a magnitude more expensive than maintaining tools in and of themselves.
I'm thinking of making it easy to "teleport" to any location within the cage
Imagine typing in coordinates or picking a location on a map, and then suddenly your phone or any other device is at that location inside the cage, by a combination of GPS, cellular and WiFi spoofing
Thank you for reading and the kind words! We're almost looking forward to this loophole being shut down to really make things a tad bit more challenging haha
We've got some ideas for the Faraday cage—a whole bunch of networks research and hacking that we can do without messing up live systems! It's also really nice to be able to test a device in isolation, without worrying about whether it's phoning back home in some way.
> We're almost looking forward to this loophole being shut down to really make things a tad bit more challenging haha
This is a great attitude in the face of a pretty sad 2024 reality: that the manufacturer of a device is expected to intentionally go out of its way to remotely stop users from using the device they bought in the way they want to use it.
- For more about the financial sector, Patrick McKenzie is solid gold every time: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/ (and I believe an HN regular as well!)
I have a nephew turning six this year and have been considering getting him some of the collections as well, wondering if it would have the same formative impact on him as on me. I remember reading the strip in the paper as a six-year-old blonde kid and coming away with the impression that there was nothing weird about daydreaming all the time, or being articulate, or having an aversion to team sports, etc. all of which traits I carry with me to this day, 30-ish years later. Of course, now I find myself identifying more with Calvin's dad - that's life, I guess!
My 6 year old loves the colorful Sunday ones... but he has me read them to him and I don't think for many of them he doesn't 'get it' yet. My guess is that the truly ideal age is around 9 or 10. That being said, I think there's no wrong time to introduce them.
I think it just keeps growing on you. Some themes in C&H are appreciated when you are older. Love and death. Friendship. Being kind to environment. Fakery in news...
This concept is not quite smoke and mirrors, since there's nothing wrong with the science, but this article definitely reads more like a breathless press release than something truly ground-breaking. More notes below:
> Synhelion was founded in 2016 as a spin-off from ETH Zurich, sparked by what the company founders describe as a crazy idea they had: what if they could reverse combustion and turn carbon dioxide and water back into fuel?
This is not a "crazy idea", but rather a straightforward description of the chemistry involved. We call one implementation of this process "photosynthesis", but there are others.
> The technology they’ve developed relies on four key components. Mirrors – known as heliostats – that track the sun to focus its energy on to a solar receiver. This in turn produces very high process heat at temperatures exceeding 1,500°C. This heat powers a thermochemical reactor that turns CO2, water and methane into syngas, which can be processed via Fischer-Tropsch into fuels.
Again, this is well-understood industrial process chemistry - absolutely a good thing, in my opinion, but not new and sexy by any stretch.
> And finally, a thermal store to release energy when the sun goes down to allow the solar-powered facility to operate around the clock.
This actually IS new and interesting in this application (or at least, it is to me) - a shame that this isn't fleshed out more in the article. I tried to see if there was more about this aspect of their process on the Synhelion website, but their pages were loading slowly and I lost patience. Sorry, team.
> The company says the design of its ultra-thin hexagonal mirrors are key to achieving such high process heats.
Any physicists out there who have a speculation about why the thinness of the mirrors makes a difference here? My understanding is that the maximum temperature that mirrors can get you is limited by the surface temperature of the sun, rather than the mirrors themselves, but I'm certainly no expert on this point.
> It uses an AI-based method involving drones to calibrate the mirrors 200 times faster compared to traditional techniques using cameras, Synhelion says. Precision is key to ensure the mirrors track the sun and efficiently reflect its light into a solar receiver at the top of a 20 m tall tower.
This bit smells like trying to shoehorn in an application of "AI" where it's not really needed - what's the actual improvement using "drones and AI" over just pre-calculating a tracking curve based on latitude + time of day/year? Or just putting down twice as many mirrors and not bothering to make them track?
> “... The inauguration of DAWN marks the beginning of the era of solar fuels – a turning point for sustainable transportation. Our founding dream of producing renewable fuels from solar energy is becoming a reality.”
This is hyperbole, as eg. Prometheus was doing this two years ago. Additionally, Synhelion will be hamstrung on growth as long as they depend on biomass methane as a feedstock, but they can solve that by buying methane from Terraform :)
>> And finally, a thermal store to release energy when the sun goes down to allow the solar-powered facility to operate around the clock.
> This actually IS new and interesting in this application
Yes, it's a nice thing to have. But it is a major research and engineering project just in itself. It is by no means a solved problem where you can buy a working solution from someone.
> This bit smells like trying to shoehorn in an application of "AI" where it's not really needed - what's the actual improvement using "drones and AI" over just pre-calculating a tracking curve based on latitude + time of day/year? Or just putting down twice as many mirrors and not bothering to make them track?
Open loop (just pre-calculate) is pretty inaccurate in a system like this. Especially over time as the mirror positioning degrades with accumulating inaccuracies.
So there might be a business case for their AI drone calibration system. But just that part in itself is also a major undertaking that requires a significant investmet over a long time to make it a production system.
"Just add more mirrors" sounds like a better business proposition, coupled with a much simpler autocalibration. Perhaps an off-center bullseye target where each mirror periodically aims itself, and a central vision system figures out the azimuth/elevation offsets?
> This is hyperbole
I agree in that I'd be very surprised if they ever get to the point of mass production.
But I agree with the point that generating synthetic fuels from the sun in a 100% renewable way would be very significant.
Sure, in 30-50 years electrical transportation might meet 99% of our needs. But we're not there yet.
Couple of points, but not a physicist or scientist.
1. I believe most existing concentrating solar plants operate below 1,000C. 1,500C might be well understood in producing syngas using other energy sources, but operating a CSP at that temperature is not. To the extent that a company is bringing a CSP plant to market with 1000+ temperature operation, that is novel.
I think you nailed it on the ceramics. Pretty sure they are looking at falling ceramic particles in the tower to capture and transfer the concentrating solar.
Silicon carbide would work up to 1800 C. Various refractory oxide ceramics could also work.
This whole approach needs direct sunlight, so it's not great for a place, like Europe, where it's often cloudy. It would be better for deserts, like in Chile, Namibia, or maybe the Arabian Peninsula.
It's not great for a production site. But for engineering tests, you can do a lot of stuff with no sun, and the occasional clear skies are used for sun testing.
> why not just use hydrogen directly and skip the inefficiency and cost of direct air capture of CO2 and of making methane?
Broadly speaking, one key reason is that we've already got the infrastructure in place for using methane (and other hydrocarbons) whereas we do not have this for hydrogen.
Another point is that this really isn't an either-or proposition: if people want hydrogen, then the Terraform electrolyzer can in principle provide it.
Neglecting the CO will absolutely be a problem. The material properties required for handling hydrogen are very different than those for other gasses, especially methane. Increasing the concentration of hydrogen significantly increases the difficulty.
But if the pressure of hydrogen was the same as the partial pressure of hydrogen before, wouldn't it be the same? I mean, if the materials could stand that partial pressure, why wouldn't they be able to stand that pressure in the absence of CO?
Unless of course that actually took it below atmospheric pressure so all the forces went in the opposite direction.
As a "carbon industry" observer, this is pretty exciting news. I've had my eye on Terraform Industries for a while and love what they're doing; they're one of the few groups that actually seem to understand the implications of what it will take to shift to a carbon-neutral economy, and their core insight about the economics of atmospheric fuel synthesis is one of those "obvious when you hear it" ideas: solar electricity is trending ever-cheaper, so rather than trying to maximize efficiency in an expensive piece of kit you can make cheap 'inefficient' equipment and get lower overall costs, which in turn unlocks scale.
I wish their headline was "natural gas from solar power" 'cause many things labeled "carbon neutral" wind-up being conventional petrochemicals plus some worthless "offsets" baloney.
In theory you can use any power source - hydroelectric, geothermal, nuclear, wind - but the benefit to solar is that you can fully utilize it when the sun is shining and store the output (compressed natural gas) for storage, transportation and use off-hours.
You could also technically use this as a grid-battery, taking in excess grid energy when it is cheap and converting it into natural gas that can be run back through a gas peaking plant that spins up to meet peak demand. You could also look into SOFC fuel cell plants [1] to convert the stored natural gas into electricity at 60% and heat at 30% (the heat is high temperature which is good for cogeneration or as a direct heat source). There would need to be some very large spreads in margin on those to make up for the fact you're likely double-dipping on inefficiencies when going from electricity in -> natgas production -> storage -> generation -> electricity out.
On that same note though - in some free and open energy markets it is not unheard of to buy at <$10/MWh during excess production periods and sell at >$200/MWh at peak on-demand - plenty of margin for arbitrage there - as the tesla megapack facilities have demonstrated in Australia. In comparison a 4MWh megapack facility (2MW in/2MW out) is priced at $1.9M before installation [2]
Yes exactly. In the UK power is becoming increasingly negative in pricing when there is high wind + solar output. This is actually increasingly alarmingly rapidly (and there is 3-5GW of offshore wind, plus loads of utility scale solar coming online).
Prices are then very high when wind and solar is low - which happens to be when demand is the highest (cold weather snaps in winter which tend to result in very low windspeeds).
National Grid is already paying £1bn/yr to turn off wind farms when supply is too high (plus paying a fortune for new nat gas peakers, which are limited by law to run for 10 days a year max). It's projected that curtailment payments to wind farms will reach £4bn/yr.
While some of this will be rectified with more transmission capacity (there is a 4GW offshore HVDC link being built between scotland and england), if the claims of terraform are true and hold up at scale, I think this is the actual breakthrough people have been looking for.
These could be connected to substations near wind farms (which also happen to be near major gas interconnectors from the north sea) and generate when power prices were low or negative, which will be a large amount of the time. They'd then get paid not only for the arbitrage in gas prices but also they would be able to take (most/all) of the curtailment payments national grid is paying the wind farms.
To be clear batteries do not work particularly well for a market like the UK. Batteries work well for overnight storage of solar, they do not work well for northern climates like the UK that require weeks of storage of power to cover low renewable output in winter. That's not to say there isn't loads of batteries being constructed right now, there is, but it's to cover very short term movements in supply and demand - the much harder problem is covering days or weeks of low output.
Because some of the windfarms still run on legacy contracts where they were incentivized by a guaranteed selling price for the power they produce. They are reimbursed for the loss of income they suffer due to curtailment.
Correct. The UK regulator (Ofgem) and thus UK consumers are being taken for a ride by windfarmers, who made these deals a precondition of building farms.
We will be paying them £2.5bn a year to not generate electricity by 2030
> You could also technically use this as a grid-battery, taking in excess grid energy when it is cheap and converting it into natural gas that can be run back through a gas peaking plant that spins up to meet peak demand.
The loss in such a cycle is abysmal, alone from thermal loss (not to mention the loss during compression and decompression) - even straight fuel cells are at 60% round-trip, compared to batteries with >>90% efficiency.
Batteries are good at smoothing out daily or even weekly variations but do not make any sense whatsoever for seasonal power storage.
It's ridiculously cost ineffective to charge a battery in July only to discharge it in December.
60% roundtrip is cost effective if you're synthesizing when the sun is blazing and the wind is blowing hard and burning it when wind, solar and batteries have all tapped out.
Thats especially so if the equipment has low capex which it seems like this does. Unlike batteries that makes it cost effective to overbuild and idle it most of the year.
> It's ridiculously cost ineffective to charge a battery in July only to discharge it in December
Indeed.
This is why the cheapest solutions in most places are a mix of a mere few days off storage plus a target production level that is a little higher than you need on an average day in winter.
While this doesn't work above the arctic circle (you could do it with a power line somewhere sunnier or a synthetic fuel, and possibly also geothermal or nuclear etc., devil is in the details for all options) overproduction + 35-90 hours of batteries is sufficient for most people and places:
Is that more effective than the traditional, "store the energy as kinetic potential energy by pushing water uphill, so you can let it go down the hill later" approach.
For storing energy cheaply for months at a time and transporting it across large distances, yes.
Pumped storage has ~90% roundtrip efficiency, good at storing energy for days or weeks but maxes out easily. The energy density of water pushed uphill is very low.
I think we should be pushing a lot more water uphill, but I see it as an alternative to or competitor to grid-scale batteries and a complement to syngas.
Syngas production will probably be most useful if built next door to a wind or solar farm and used to siphon off energy which is currently curtailed when the grid is maxed out.
It can then be easily stored in enormous quantities and easily transported by ship to anywhere in the world that needs it.
I'm curious about where you read this. I see this idea that pumped storage geography is rare pop up a lot on Hacker News but I don't know where it's coming from and it rarely seems to come with citations.
If you look at this map, you'll see that unlike, say, dam-appropriate geography, it's actually extremely common:
The problem is, the potential for buildouts of pumped hydro isn't that large any more. In Europe, most usable areas have been built out, and new projects are likely to be denied because anything involving creating dams or bodies of water with rapid differences in water level is incredibly devastating on nature and wildlife.
I'll admit that I wasn't talking about potential green-field sites not linked to rivers or existing reservoirs, as described in your link. How many of the sites they identified as viable with their algorithm would actually be economically, socially and environmentally viable is a big question though. Not saying some of these sites can come to fruition, but for sure the capex and lead time for this kind of projects is huge.
> People are getting pumped storage and river dams mixed up. It seems mschuster91 also mixed them up.
The environmental impact is bad for both.
River dams break fish crossings, the dammed up area gets flooded and wipes out nature as well as archeological artifacts and the dams are at constant risk of damage - especially in a war, see Ukraine for multiple examples, but also due to maintenance neglect, negligence during construction and natural disasters like earthquakes. In the worst cases such as China's Three Gorges dam, millions of people were displaced as well [1].
Pumped storage can come in two variants, either as an associate to ordinary river dams (so they inherit their issues), or as greenfield construction, where they have the same impact on the flooded are, with the additional impact of countless animals dying during pump and empty cycles.
A link to the three gorges dam wikipedia page says exactly nothing about the potential environmental impact of pumped storage but it does confirm that you are confusing the two technologies.
... which is why I linked to the Three Gorges Dam in the paragraph where I described the issues with dammed storage, and made an entirely separate paragraph describing the issues of pumped storage.
> On that same note though - in some free and open energy markets it is not unheard of to buy at <$10/mWh during excess production periods and sell at >$200/mWh at peak on-demand - plenty of margin for arbitrage there - as the tesla megapack facilities have demonstrated in Australia. In comparison a 4mWh megapack facility (2MW in/2MW out) is priced at $1.9M before installation [2]
I really wonder about unintended consequences. It's exciting to be able to store solar as methane because we can "plug" this new synthetic methane easily into existing infrastructure. (But we have to get better at leak management!)
However, you almost always go through huge underground methane pockets when drilling for oil. So oil drilling stations vent / flare methane when they can't "off site" it, like when natural gas pipelines are at capacity. In those moments, the price of methane actually drops below zero--I've seen it at -$1.20 per MMBtu as recently as this year! Essentially you are paying someone to get rid of the stuff for you.
So... if we flood the market with new, cost-effective synthetic methane... will companies just flare more of it as we drill for oil?
Climate town just did a piece on natural gas leaks and how its a much more serious problem that previously considered - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2oL4SFwkkw - certainly soured me a bit on natural gas in general, at least until there's better regulation in place.
There's a lot of interest in cracking methane to ethylene and hydrogen, both which are super useful in their own right. There's also the Fischer-Tropsch process which synthesises arbitrary linear alkane hydrocarbons. That requires more intermediate steps, to make syngas from methane and water.
Burning off excess methane is always going to be a problem that needs to be solved regardless. There are just too many small, remote sources that aren't likely to ever justify the cost of infrastructure build out to use on grid. For example, landfills are a big, distributed source of methane that aren't going away.
Bitcoin miners are the most commonly touted solution here, because you can drop in small modules of generators+miners with no infrastructure other than a satellite link.
Funny enough, with carbon accounting rules giving huge incentives for efficiently burning waste methane, a small percentage of the bitcoin mining network doing this could actually make bitcoin the only carbon negative industry on the planet (from a carbon accounting perspective, not literally).
Right, but the point is, once this costs nearly-the-same as methane extracted from the ground, it's not worth it to pull methane out of the ground! We'd stop having an incentive to add more CO2 to the atmosphere!
We'd be able to get to net-zero carbon / methane emissions without having to substantially change our living conditions. Cities or states would "just" bottle up some liquid methane for the winter months (or summer months) and seasonal energy usage changes become much easier to manage. (I'm aware that would involve creating more infrastructure.)
I don't think it does, though that would be great. Burning the methane on site as waste is still significantly better than releasing it into the air (converting methane to mostly CO2 is still better than not doing it).
This technology doesn't need to solve global warming. Even if it just buys us some more time, it is fantastic news.
If you could get that methane and use it for something productive, what would you propose? I'm looking for ideas, some process that has relatively easy to transport equipment (no expensive big buildings which have to be demolished when oil field is depleted), energy intensive and makes some valuable product with that energy. If someone has any wild/interesting ideas in this space, I'd like to hear it.
Methane and its siblings (methanol, ethanol, ethane) are used as a basic feedstock for more advanced chemical processes, like plastic synthesis, or drugs, or plenty of other organic compounds.
Obviously the easiest one is "store, then burn it for energy", but it seems to me, with this technology, that methane or propane powered vehicles might see lower fuel costs. This process would just make them carbon neutral.
Problem #1 is finding people to pay for it until then.
Problem #2 is that this will make fore expensive energy at the end, efficiency being one problem and capital cost of those idle gas turbines being another. We'll have to wait and see if these ever plan any role beyond a demonstration project or two, but I'm skeptical it'll compete on price.
It's an excellent way forward because it's not only carbon-neutral, it can also "fall back" to pure CO2 capture should we ever get a decent enough grid & storage mechanisms to afford that.
What is going on with the section numbering in that blog and infographic? Super interested in the content I can't focus when we start with section 7 then jump to 9 then 13 then back to 8.
Methane has a short half-life in the atmosphere, so its cumulative effect after a few decades is close to CO2 unless you're constantly outputting more, and that's assuming you're not burning it.
In the case where you're making methane from atmospheric CO2 and then burning it, it's just returning the same CO2 back, which per the article is carbon neutral.
There's a big difference in scale between "burning hydrocarbons to heat and power much of the world" (which includes leakage from fossil fuel drilling) and "we make some methane to be almost completely consumed and there are some leaks".
Couldn't agree with you more, and honestly I think you're softballing it here:
> I think it’s pretty lazy to crank out a vibes based article describing specific grievances and generalizing to an entire population.
In that the article doesn't even describe _specific_ grievances, really; we get three quotes in this order:
- A Paul Graham tweet where he says "multiple founders" have changed their minds; the _personal_ opinion he expresses is that "he doubts things will go all the way back to the way they were before Covid, but it looks like they will go most of the way back." Nothing specific mentioned about why the founders changed their minds.
- A truly stripped-of-context quote from Keith Rabois that gets closest to saying something specific i.e. 'that younger workers “learn by osmosis,” which requires in-person interaction' (false as presented, and if this is a genuine reflection of his opinion then he doesn't actually understand training) and 'supervisors discover hidden talent by watching [younger employees]' (true enough, but presented as a problem with remote work when it's actually not)
- Absolute banger from Sam Altman: “I think definitely one of the tech industry’s worst mistakes in a long time was that everybody could go full remote forever, and startups didn’t need to be together in person and, you know, there was going to be no loss of creativity ... I would say that the experiment on that is over.” - the implied grievance here is that "remote work makes startups less creative" which is, to its' credit, an actual position for which one can make a coherent argument. He may even have gone to the trouble of doing this at some point, for all I know. The rest is pure sophistry, though - "one of the tech industry's worst mistakes ... was that everybody could go full remote forever" is just not an accurate reflection of what actually happened, and if he's exaggerating for effect, then I'd be interested to know what effect he was going for; he's also really softballing the reason why remote work happened in the first place: it wasn't an "experiment," it was a forced response to a world crisis with existential implications!
There's significant overgeneralizing happening here too, as you suggested; at best, you can say that these guys are referring to what's true of _startups specifically_, where they're at least domain experts, but even if their arguments ARE true of startups (and I am deeply skeptical that this is the case) you can't assume that they'll be true of OTHER organizational types.
Genuinely of two minds about this piece - on the one hand, the cynical hand, it feels (to me) like one of the second-tier pitches you see in Mad Men that's meant to contrast with a top-tier Don Draper pitch...
... but on the other hand, the optimistic hand, it's compelling to consider what "optimizing for feeling in software" could mean, beyond just an impressive-sounding mission statement for The Browser Company.
... of course, back to the cynical hand for a moment, it's hard to read something like this:
> You see — if software is to have soul, it must feel more like the world around it. Which is the biggest clue of all that feeling is what’s missing from today’s software.
and just take it for granted. Really? The thing that software should have is soul, and that means it should feel like the world around it(?) and that's a clue(??) that feeling is missing?
... but back to the optimistic hand for a second, who cares how the piece is written if it's making you think about how to make software, writ large, radically better? Or even just making you think, as it made me think, that software, writ large, CAN be radically better than it is? Because the piece is right! OKR culture feels crappy! Down with KPIs!
And back and forth I could go. I upvoted this piece because I think it could spark some interesting discussion here - anybody else of two (or three, or...) minds about this?
> it's hard to read something like this: […] and just take it for granted. Really? The thing that software should have is soul, and that means it should feel like the world around it(?) and that's a clue(??) that feeling is missing?
I agree it’s not the best writing, but it’s still clear to me what they mean. The restaurant is an example of a thing in the real world that is valuable because it has a “soul” and evokes certain feelings. If software generally lacks soul, but other things are valuable to us partly because they are soulful, that is a clue that software might be more valuable if it were more soulful too.
Looking over the "fact sheet" linked in the announcement[1], this appears to be the key requirement:
> When filing [Beneficial Ownership Information] reports with FinCEN, the rule requires a reporting company to identify itself and report four pieces of information about each of its beneficial owners: name, birthdate, address, and a unique identifying number and issuing jurisdiction from an acceptable identification document (and the image of such document).
While I could wish this information would be public in the same way as eg. SEC form 4 filings, this rule really does feel (to me, a rank layman) like a big step forward for corporate transparency... to government, at least. Still pretty exciting!
Any corporate legal eagles out there who have an actual informed perspective to share on this new rule and its possible effects?
Not that I'm a lawyer, but this rule strikes me has having a lot of potential. If a company declares false beneficiaries, it may be hard to find the true beneficiary, but I would think it's a lot easier to find and prosecute everyone involved in the false declaration.
Civil asset forfeiture applies to non-powerful people like immigrants who like cash, and silent generation people who never trusted banks again. The powerful would slip away and the government would seize middle class grandma’s house after she used an LLC but forgot to file FinCEN paperwork.
No need to declare false beneficiaries. Click through to the final rule and ctrl-F “exempt”, then keep in mind there are jurisdictions that approach capital formation by creating structures that fall into those categories.
> While I could wish this information would be public
oh absolutely, that would very useful for when you want to find where varrious people that you'd like to murder live when they unhelpfully owned their home via an entity to keep their address private.
As it is you'll just have to wait for fincen to leak or sell the data, since thankfully congress provided for no meaningful consequences for this datas disclosure or misuse.
I'll argue that the higher-level context introduced in point 2 is even more important here: "ORG shifts from assume we have infinite budget mode to we need to break even next year or we’ll die" i.e. the whole scenario exists not because the business can't accurately evaluate TCO, it's because the business is in do-or-die mode and long-term TCO doesn't matter NOW.
That is, this whole scenario takes place in a situation where there is a organizationally vital need to cut costs. What happens afterwards is a trade of long-term risk (internalizing an essential business function and giving it a bus factor of one) for immediate financial improvement (no more SaaS spend). Long-term TCO doesn't matter if the company collapses next quarter, right?
And in that short-term frame, the project is an unqualified success: X10 delivers exactly what was needed, and the SaaS spend is eliminated. But the risk hits: X10 leaves the company.
[So, pointing out this hypothetical company isn't correctly estimating TCO is correct, but irrelevant; they're in a position where having to pay the long term costs will be a better problem than the one they have now - a reasonable business decision, though not a great one to have to make.]
For what it's worth, I completely agree with your original point: organizations really do systemically underestimate the total cost of ownership of a service. Within the example in the article, the flawed assumption is pretty explicitly laid out in point 7: "For all intents and purposes, development is done, they only need to keep the lights on." - and exploring WHY this assumption is flawed is the core of the article (section 3).
So, ultimately I agree with dambi0 in the GP comment - the lede hasn't been buried here, rather the whole article is a discussion of one aspect of the very point you make. Why DO organizations systematically underestimate service TCO? Because, at least in part, there is not yet a widespread understanding that a service is not "software" in and of itself; rather, a service is the organizational understanding of a solution to an organizational problem domain, and maintaining organizations is orders of a magnitude more expensive than maintaining tools in and of themselves.