> On 06/24/2011 09:14 AM, Rodrigo E. De León Plicet wrote:
> I'm quite surprised the article didn't mention the importance of having
> "somebody to sue if it goes wrong", which is a comment I often see made
> re Oracle. It's lucky they didn't try to stress that point, because
> evidence of succesful suits by customers against Oracle are ... hard to
> come by ... and Oracle's army of lawyers makes it unlikely that suits
> would succeed. Despite that and the fact that a suit is unlikely to
> award damages sufficient to make up for your losses unless you can show
> negligence or willful misbehavior, people keep on talking about needing
> to have somebody to sue.
The article also forgot to mention what I call the "chair cutting problem".
Most decisions in IT departments, particularly in larger companies, are based
on the probability to take the grunt when something goes wrong. Therefor, no
IT Manager who wants to keep his job will buy anything else than what the CEO
thinks is the market leader. If you buy the market leader's product, you take
no risk. Clearly you made a good choice, so only the manufacturer is to blame
if something goes wrong (and we all know, sooner or later something will go
wrong).
I've seen this over and over in 20+ years of IT consulting. Let's buy Oracle,
Microsoft, IBM - clearly that's the good choices.
Well, not always, but it sure is a choice that ensures the safety of the CTO.
I've had one - ONE - client who accepted my recommendation to use PostgreSQL
for their not all that large custom system. Ever since we've implemented the
software and taken it to production the server and software functioned flawless
and they don't even have anyone to check on the server (no DBA or sysadmin
there). Sure, they're relatively small with 50+ employees, but for the little
money it cost they got something that has been running fine since 2003. Last
time I checked the server was up close to 500 days.
They didn't use my recommendation for mostly linux servers (they did well
before the housing slump, but ever since are short on money). Instead they
hired a "sysadmin" company - which happens to be a OEM for HP. By the end of
the day they spent close to half a million to replace 2 linux servers with 8
windows servers - which don't even work as well as the old servers did
(although, that may be an issue with the "sysadmin company" - they want to
sell more and are probably not interested or incapable of proper system
administration).
Oh, well, all I can say is I'd trust PostgreSQL with my payroll any day of the
week (and actually do, as these days my main business - not IT consulting
anymore - is running on PostgreSQL and again has been pretty much flawless for
3+ years now - with over 100.000 transactions a day)
Uwe
