RedHat CEO Suggests Trouble for Traditional Software Vendors
October 22, 2010
I am not sure about my reaction. Am I to be surprised? Nah, the commercial vendors’ licensing fees put a world of hurt into the big, throbbing brains of chief financial officers. On the other hand, yep. An open source vendor stands up and questions what made IBM Big Blue.
Point your browser at “Red Hat CEO: Software Vendor Model Is Broken” and get the info direct. For me, the key passage in the story was:
Whitehurst [RedHat boss] kicked off his talk by asking a seemingly simple question: “Why are costs of IT going up when the underlying costs to deliver those services halves every 18 months?” The cost of computing should come down, he reasoned, thanks to improving processing speeds and storage capacities. New, more powerful development tools and frameworks should also ease the cost of deployment. Yet IT expenditures continue to go up by about 3 percent to 5 percent a year. The answer to his question is that “it’s the vendors and how we are delivering [IT] for our customers,” he said.
My thought is that today’s systems are like a sticky rolling pin and cookie dough. Push and pull and the mess sticks to the rolling pin and the cookies suck. The fix is to call in another cook or send someone to the bakery to buy a cookie that is edible. Every step adds costs. The rolling pin is the flow of requirements from users who don’t know from agile. Users need to do their job. The cookie dough is the compound of stuff jammed together by rushed cooks. The result? Lousy cookies and a growing interest in open source.
And cloud computing? Just an expression of dissatisfaction. I am not sure I am 100 percent in agreement, but I know there are lots of lousy cookies out there and legions of second tier consultants advising on butter, flour, milk, and eggs. One problem. Not too many Julia Childs, just lots of children.
Stephen E Arnold, October 33, 2010
Freebie unlike Girl Scout cookies
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
