[ale] Microsoft Windows ousted at California school district

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Thu, 2007-03-01 at 15:02 -0500, Jeff Lightner wrote:
> Politics is easy ? Management often does what they perceive as
> ?cheapest? not ?best?.   
> 
> I used to work for a company that had a whole chain of sites using SCO
> Xenix (That?s right XENIX not UNIX) 1.0 on AT&T 286 processors.  
> 
> Later the guy who had been with the company during the install came
> back to the company.  I asked why the heck he had done that.  It
> turned out they had spec?ed 386 machines running AT&T 386 UNIX but
> right before the install AT&T discontinued one line of 386s in favor
> of another that would have bumped the cost per site.   He was in a
> meeting where the woman who was in charge (later famously going to
> prison for saying only little people pay taxes) noted that she?d just
> gone through a cost increment on another (restaurant systems) upgrade
> and wouldn?t tolerate one for the hotel systems.   The Xenix on 286
> was the result.  It worked albeit not as well as the original solution
> would have.   The fact that the users had to backup using tar on 5 ??
> floppies was only one of the daily costs that resulted from this
> capital cost ?savings?.  

Wow.

It's interesting, because usually, the best solution is the least
expensive solution, at least in the long run.  Why do people look for
the quick fix and not the long term solution?

    -- Mike

--
Michael B. Trausch
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Phone: (404) 592-5746
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