take the time to think for yourself and don't be led by marketing – nor the baying – of fools.
This is good advice for life.
Good enough IT really is good enough. You don't need new hardware
Enterprises are slow to adopt new IT. Or is it small businesses that are slow to adopt new IT? Wait, the mid-market is traditionally underserved and overly reliant on appliances so clearly they have to be the laggards! All of this is true, and none of this is true. It just depends on your point of view. Adoption of new IT …
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 13:14 GMT AndrueC
Re: take the time to think for yourself and don't be led by marketing – nor the baying – of fools.
The Space Merchants should be required reading in school. I read it when I was a young teenager and I've never forgotten the message.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 21:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: take the time to think for yourself and don't be led by marketing – nor the baying – of fools.
Then again I have seen enough shops penny wise and pound foolish that thought it would be a good idea to give their ready to throw away kit to the expensive contractors as well. Granted this was more relevant a decade ago but saving on nearly commodity hardware isn't always smart if labor is most of your costs.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 12:31 GMT DanX
Cloud based desktops, sound amazing but...
Take a hosted Desktop environment, and gain massively from easy to manage and deploy applications. Data security and other benefits too.
Take this proposal to client at an SME, and try to explain those massive savings compared to the ongoing costs.
What happens though - is they still need a desktop to run in their office - and even the worst desktop, will manage 90%+ of everything they need to do.
Not an easy or obvious sell. What they have is good enough.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 15:55 GMT Skoorb
Re: Cloud based desktops, sound amazing but...
Not to mention needing to entirely rip and replace a good chunk of your network setup, SAN etc.
We run from over 500 sites, along with a load of people "agile" working off laptops. I'm sure quoting for that kind of external connectivity would have our Virgin Media account manager drooling.
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Wednesday 27th April 2016 08:54 GMT Naselus
Re: Cloud based desktops, sound amazing but...
We've been investigating the possibility of just using locally-hosted dumb terminals for a heavy CAD workload... every penny we'd save on client hardware is more than taken up by the massive upgrades required for our internal switches to take the load. I dread to think of the pipes we'd need for external hosting to be practical.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 21:05 GMT Shadow Systems
@Smitty...
Enjoy a pint from me for every upvote the system won't let me give you, just try not to get alcohol poisoning in the process.
(Envisions giving the computer a hefty *THROW* to accellerate it on the way down, the better to maximize the splatter pattern.)
MUH Hahahahahahahahaha...
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 17:29 GMT 45RPM
Except that…
The problem is that IT vendors cycle their hardware far too quickly these days - so, if you want to continue benefitting from support (kinda handy for mission critical kit), you need to run to keep up. I have systems running on DL380 G4 - and you know what? It's good enough. It does what I want - and there's no point in replacing it. Except that I can't get support for the bloody things anymore - so it's upgrade time to G9 (which, in turn, will be end of life this year I think). And so the wheel turns, and HPE continue to fill the coffers at our expense.
Contrast with the happy days of VAX and Alpha - those things remained in production for years and, in most cases, remained supported for a decade or more. Halcyon days.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 20:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Except that…
Not really a problem if you have the service department to deal with it.
We have a client that has a number of DL385 G2 that are still running and doing the job they were bought for back then. Our service has enough spare parts to keep them going for at least the next twenty years which is all the client asks for, all the factory machine tools will be replaced by then.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 21:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Except that…
Quite true. and yet...DEC is long gone while HPE lumbers on. At some point you have to throw money at your chosen vendors just to keep them in business, or else design your systems so elastically that everyone truly is a click away from being replaced. Either way you'll be paying.
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Wednesday 27th April 2016 06:53 GMT 45RPM
Re: Except that…
HPE gets handed great wodges of cash every year to support these systems - whether they require support or not. So don't cry for them - they're getting paid. But still they tell us that the systems can no longer be supported once they reach a certain age. Still doesn't stop them pocketing the money for the service contract though.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 17:43 GMT Notas Badoff
Seen on a business card...
Oh please somebody print a bunch of business cards saying
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Gottfried A. Boodle
Aught but Avarice and Ego
.
or name of your persuasion, leave these around at conferences / business meetings / etc. , and we'll see which industry these are copied into. We know what kind of person that'll be - what'll be interesting is in what kind of industry this is considered mere bragging rights. Finance?
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Wednesday 27th April 2016 03:54 GMT Oengus
Not just IT
It isn't just IT that have the "Good enough isn't good enough" mantra.
Look at the other industries
Fashion: it was the latest and greatest last week. This week it isn't good enough.
Cars: Last years model was good enough for you last year. You need the latest one now.
Phones: I suppose they could fit under the IT umbrella (unless in my case where it is a phone not a smart phone)
Cameras: 24 megapixel isn't good enough we have a 26 megapixel model now...
Every industry is producing "Good enough for now". If they came up with perfect we would never need to buy another one and they would go out of business...
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Wednesday 27th April 2016 09:42 GMT Robert E A Harvey
26 megapixel
Quite. I have taken the opportunity to go from 8Mp to 12Mp to 18Mp to 28Mp, but only because I needed to buy a new camera at each time.
That said, the Olympus's OM-D E-M5 II is interesting. It's "only" 16Mp, which is a perfectly reasonable sweet spot for taking jolly good pictures - but if you tripod mount it it subverts the image stabilisation motors to dither the sensor about and take a 50Mp image. That's clever, and I can see myself being attracted. But there is no /point/ in going backwards from AP/C to micro4/3rds, and from 28 to 16 just to get 50. So my wallet is safe.
Probably
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Saturday 30th April 2016 13:12 GMT Jonathan Richards 1
Not only is good enough good enough...
... but better has to be >= (good enough + cost of implementation) where 'implementation' includes but is not limited to capital costs, installation, training, modification of test procedures, overhauling backup and disaster recovery, and the salesman's fat commission.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
