Re: [tae] The internet architecture

Thomas Narten wrote:

>> I suppose it follows that people don't actually need those applications
>> to work in order to continue doing business... in which case, of course
>> they shouldn't upgrade them.
> 
> Keith, this is umbelievably simplisitic logic. 

This whole discussion is unbelievably simplistic logic.  Insults don't
make the logic any better.

> The applications run today. Important things would
> break if they were turned off. But there is no money to pay for an
> upgrade (by the customer) because the budget is only so big, and the
> current budget was more focussed on beefing up security and trying to
> get VoIP running. Or, the vendor doesn't have an upgrade because the
> product is EOL, and the customer can't afford to buy a replacement for
> it (again for a number of different reasons). Or, the vendor does have
> an upgraded product, but it requires running the latest version of the
> product, which doesn't run on the OS release you happen to be running
> (and can't change for various reasons), and would require new hardware
> on top of things because the new product/OS is a memory pig, or was
> rewritten in Java, etc., etc.

Yep.  I've seen it happen many times in various guises.  By now it is
widely understood that many things need maintenance budgets - e.g.
buildings, vehicles, computer and networking hardware.  And we actually
have a decent sense of how much to budget for those things.  But we
don't have a widely-understood idea of what it costs to maintain
software, particularly networking software.  There's both a strong
tendency to believe that software is fixed-cost and an increasing
tendency to fire in-house programmers and push things like software
maintenance to third parties - which is to say, they don't get paid for.
 But when the Internet keeps changing (for many more reasons than IPv4
address space exhaustion) you can't expect the software to stay static
and keep working well.

>> Either that, or the people who are making these decisions don't really
>> understand what's important to keeping their businesses running... and
>> those businesses will fail.
> 
> They may understand very well. But a simple cost/benefit analysis (in
> terms of $$ and/or available technical resources) says they can't
> afford to upgrade.
> 
> Happens all the time. Why do you think people run old software for
> years and years and years?

Most likely, because they aren't properly estimating cost and/or
benefit, or because they are too focused on short-term costs and
ignoring medium- and long-term costs.

Keith
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