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I don't know what an "absolute type of planner" is, but I consider myself an engineer and a pragmatist. I'm well versed with realities. In reality, with business, there's no such thing as "priceless", only risk, and risk is, generally, quantifiable. With enough data, it's easily quantifiable. I admit that, having an affinity for startups, rather than more traditional small businesses, I have a greater affinity for risk. Ironically, perhaps, I'm usually the voice of risk-aversion with respect to IT infrastucture, so I don't believe it affects my overall understanding. I recently pointed out to an interviewer who was trying to convince me that it was worth spending half a megabuck on a petabyte from Netapp because it was "business critical" instead of 1/10th that amount for DIY, that, just like the DIY solution, Netapp does not indemnify the business against loss. One isn't buying insurance, only a bunch of technology. Sure, "works the first time" is worth something. Is it worth the cost of a whole, complete, extra server on a order of qty 6? If the infant-mortality rate on servers is anywhere approaching 1-in-6 and they're being shipped somewhere that the replacement time and/or cost would be prohibitive, I'd still probably rather just order 7 servers instead. That's my main problem with paying a vendor for "reliability": it's a very fuzzy, hand-wavy assurance. Paying for reliability with more hardware has data and statistics behind it, which is an engineering solution. |