[peteretep]

    > People throwing money and hardware at
    > problems instead of doing the simple
    > and obvious thing

There are (almost) no technical problems, just business decisions. Programmer time for development and maintenance is expensive. Hardware is decreasingly so (also it's CapEx, so nobody cares if you literally light it on fire).

[wmccullough]

I find this too. Even the so-called proprietary algorithms many companies tout aren't even that complicated because 90% of their business runs on a REST over CRUD in SQL web service with a slightly different bootstrap theme on the frontend.

[xorcist]

See, now you fell for the same fallancy. Something that is smart must surely be more expensive, but this is seldom true. A method that is simple is easier to describe, easier to implement and could very well be more performant than a more complicated one.