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by bartread
1858 days ago
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About 5 years ago I briefly contracted for a large multinational, who shall remain nameless, who were still running a version of some Lotus thing (I forget whether it was Notes or Smartsuite) that was well over a decade out of support, and possibly two decades old, running on a long since obsolete niche operating system, on hardware that probably dated from the 90s. None of it could be upgraded. Which would have been fine except that it had dependencies, and those dependencies had dependencies, and... you get the idea. I got the distinct impression that were it to fail or be unplugged every system in the business might slowly and inexorably fail over a period of days or weeks, eventually grinding all trading activity to a halt. They were trying to figure out what to do about it and, fortunately, the guy in charge of replacing it really seemed to enjoy that kind of problem but, for all I know, they're still running it. |
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People should know that hardware will become obsolete or fail, that software will become unsupported, the supplier might go bust etc.
You need to be able to run generations of IT in parallel so that you always have newer hardware/software getting used/proved alongside the old nonsense and if you will need to replace an aging system, you better have seen it coming enough years earlier to give you time to find a replacement.
Also, large corporates have a habit of over-customising what they want so a new system has to be completely bespoke = slow and expensive to replace.