[jojobas]

It's not so much central planners deciding who can have what, but rather a natural monopoly. You don't want your water/electricity depend on a family-run shop that can just shut down, and neither you want your purchasing department to hinge on that guy from logistics who can just quit, leaving behind his magic incomprehensible spreadsheets.

[ethbr1]

We decided that the water/electricity utility doesn't get to control how you use the amount you consume.

Modern IT is more like if your water utility had final say over which faucet you installed and how you used it.

[bee_rider]

If you started using water in, like, industrial or agricultural quantities I guess the town would eventually get curious what is going on.

[ethbr1]

Well, you'd still be paying for it.

Authorizing use would be akin to the pre-Carterphone ATT model where only pre-approved uses would be allowed ('you can't attach your equipment to our network').

Thankfully, we eventually realized that was a dumb decision and moved to something closer to user freedom + network protects itself + zero trust.

Better to just guide behavior at the pricing level, and let people make their own decisions about use.

[bee_rider]

I think the analogy to water use just doesn’t work well.

If we had to make some sort of water use analogy, I’d go with something like; the corporate network is a somewhat protected environment that needs to be maintained to be useful. So it it is more like a reservoir than a faucet.

It would actually be OK for a couple people to go swimming and even pee in the reservoir. Some people could even boat in the reservoir, if they went out of their way to make sure that their boats are clean, safe, no pollution, etc. But lots of places just have a general “don’t go in the reservoir” rule. Not because a person would damage it, but because everybody doing it would.

It is hard as a residential user to use enough water to damage the reservoir, but hypothetically if you managed to, somebody would check in. Even if you are paying, the town doesn’t want to run dry. If there is a drought, residential users might be asked to use less water.

Price doesn’t work as a signal in corporate IT for individual workers, because it is expected that the company will “subsidize” the worker to the extent needed to do their job. If we want to make the analogy work—at least in some areas, landlords are required to provide water to their customers. In that case, you can use as much water as you want for free, but your landlord will get curious and might find some way to get you on the hook if you pass some reasonable threshold.

You can also do some things as a user like dump toxic waste down your toilet. This would be sort of like running a publicly visible unpatched XP system on the network. It would damage the system, and why do you have that in the first place?

Anyway, that was fun to write, but I don’t know that it is particularly useful. In order to make the analogy fit, we need to bring in as much complexity from the water management system as the IT system has.

[jojobas]

You can use as much water/power as the pipes/wires allow through, but you don't get to have petrol pipes, beer pipes or milkshake pipes laid to your property, neither you get to choose 160V DC or 430V 400Hz electricity, however useful all of these things are.

[TeMPOraL]

> but you don't get to have petrol pipes, beer pipes or milkshake pipes laid to your property, neither you get to choose 160V DC or 430V 400Hz electricity

Sure you can have all of these. They're just not offered as part of normal utilities. Nobody will care if you build yourself some, except maybe for petrol pipes due to fire/explosion risk.

[jojobas]

Good luck getting you council to approve buried pipes from a brewery even 100m down the road. Within the confines of your parcel - maybe, so enjoy your Visual Builder for (beer) Aficionados.

[7952]

Although those kind of questions around continuity happen across business. Sometimes the service you are offering depends on individual contact and flexibility rather than offering a commodity utility. And dependance on a small number of individuals is an acceptable and understood risk. The trouble with software is when managers don't understand that risk and offload it on another department when things go wrong.

[xen2xen1]

Oh dear God how many times I've had to support that.