@scottalanmiller
@scottalanmiller said:
That's nuts. I always wonder how companies get into a situation like this.
Because it means that sometime, twenty years ago, someone said "let's invest all kinds of effort into putting code onto a totally proprietary machine that we are 100% dependent on the vendor to support... forever." And then everyone else agreed. And then almost immediately that company went out of business. By 2001 this would have been an all out emergency in any business.. a totally unsupported critical system.
And for the next decade and a half everyone just depends on it and semi-ignores the fact that a very tiny decision window in the 1990s has caused almost two decades of crazy cost and risk and what took just a tiny bit of time to cause a problem has become decades of being unable to fix.
Yep, that's pretty much it in a nutshell.
'course, we're government, so this kind of thing is almost expected
OTOH, I can't say I blame them. 20 years ago it seemed kind of like the wild west. Nobody was clairvoyant, who could have known which wagon to hitch up to. I'm not sure much has changed. How many Novell shops made the wrong call (that was us too :)).
For all we know, Scale Computing could be a non-entity 3 years from now. [I know that's not exactly the same -- even if Scale folded or was bought out, you would still retain VM mobility, but it was still a big investment]