From the letter of Anthony Youngman (a.k.a. Wol):
“I work using a similar technology: Pick. It gets ignored,
overlooked, replaced without thinking, all because, for a database
of given size, Pick works twice as fast as SQL, on half the
hardware and with half the staff. So it’s seen as a
risk—there aren’t enough people around in the company who
know how to use it.“This comment was sparked by one of the panel’s comments about
getting rid of the staff who know a system—especially if it’s
a mission-critical system. And unfortunately, company officers
would sometimes (like my own company) rather employ extra people on
inferior technology because they don’t want the risk of employing
just one person who knows the system. It’s far safer to employ four
on a worse system because there are no experts to lose.“The reality is that they should employ two experts on twice the
salary, but that’s not PHB logic. I wonder what the reduction in
head count will be when Linux pushes out Microsoft and all the
‘Microsoft Certified Solitaire Experts’ are let go…”
Related Story:
CIO Insight: Open Source Goes Mainstream(Jun 18, 2002)