Is it worth the risk/work to move everything over? For a lot of enterprises, their needs to be a huge cost savings or risk reduction. Risk usually being the most important factor the bigger the company.
I know of one largish bank moving away from Oracle middleware and RDMS. It's happening in pieces starting with low hanging fruit and for awhile the two will run in parallel (with the new data stores starting off as a comparison check to reconcile any bugs that crop up). Some early wins were account transaction logs that can go into better suited DBs, etc.
My understanding is that they were relatively lucky in that most of the hard parts are in the middleware layer and rarely the DB itself - the bank has been around since the 1800s, so has a huge mishmash of technologies that go from old IBM mainframes up to more modern cloud infra. So they're already kind of used to using middleware logic to stitch together various data sources.
The funny thing is that my contact there said the primary impetus is that they see the writing on the wall for a lot of their "legacy" Sun hardware, and figure if they're going to have to redo a lot of it, they may as well re-architect the rest. There'll still be oracle DBs running in the bank for a looong time, but there'll be less and less of it.
If it's the same for others as it was for us recently then very difficult... but the cost savings were so massive in terms of margin the risk was worth it. What taylodl mentioned about growing institutional knowledge and experience with Postgres in other apps first rang true as well. We are not 100% Oracle free, but we have migrated much away already.
In the larger discussion, I also wonder what their new contract rate is for these solutions. Even if 0% were migrating off, if 0% were migrating on then the net rate would still be decently negative because of natural business/app attrition.
When was the last time Microsoft had a unified vision that was focused on building an amazing line of products that integrated well with each other?
I can only think of short snippets in history where they moved in that direction for maybe a year or two & then went scatterbrain.
Microsoft has benefited from a monopoly in the enterprise and has never been forced to innovate from a product perspective. See Slack/Teams as a case study of how they have operated when even slightly pushed.
* Edit - .NET, C#, TypeScript teams are an exception to the above. Highly underrated. Amazing talent there. Not sure who all gets credit. Anders & Mads for sure though.
I'd say the late '80s - early '90s when Microsoft was building the early versions of Microsoft Office. Integration among productivity apps was one of the key points of competition among all of the office suites of that era.
There were other huge coordinated efforts like the TwC initiative and the Windows 10 refactoring but those were invisible to end users.
You are right if talking about the efforts improving C# and CLR, taking the lessons out of Midori, Blazor and Aspire.
Regarding F#, VB, and C++/CLI, the poor souls are on a lifeline that makes CLR nowadays stand out for C# Language Runtime, instead of the original Common.
And the chaos that reigns on Windows Forms, WPF, WinUI, MAUI certainly isn't helping.
Finally they are constrained in what they can put into C# DevKit as means to not canibalize Visual Studio and Windows sales, it can only be good enough, not great and feature parity.
Also regardless of the reasoning behind it, having TypeScript rewriten into C# instead of Go would have been a great opportunity to make C# more relevant outside Microsoft shops, instead anyone looking to contribute to TypeScript compiler will be learning Go instead.
For enterprises it almost always comes down to - does it reduce risk, is it easy to manage, authentication & authorization features, is it good enough & is it compatible with our current stuff.
It would help if Americans educated themselves on the basics of taxes. They would realize quickly how W-2 income employees pay a very high tax rate when you factor in FICA vs high wealth individuals who pay little to no FICA or income taxes. Add in the benefit of compound interest, cheap margin loans, and you have an incredibly unfair system. It's also why many wealthy individuals argue for a "smaller" government & less taxes. They travel private, go to private schools & prefer to avoid anything "public".
All this is with just the very basics, not counting step up basis, trusts or anything slightly complicated.
I'm not joking, in Australia the tax "filing" takes like 2 mins, you literally go, next, next, look at the details, "yep looks correct" put in your claims, and then submit.
You are all done.
Unless you have something wack going on its not even a process. I have had signups which are more complicated then it.
American taxes on the other hand mega suck, and have 9000 pitfalls.
Finland doesn't even ask you to approve. They send you a suggestion and if you do not amend it by deadline they take it as it is.
And amending is online form where everything is clearly explained, links to documentation. And longest time it takes is actually to look up numbers from your own records.
In the US, property tax typically works that way for many people. You get something in the mail that says this is what your tax will be. If you happen to have a loan for your house, the bank in charge of your loan handles it.
The only opposing political argument I've heard is that if income taxes were this simple, many people would be overpaying. I think that argument has many obvious flaws. Unfortunately few US citizens demand anything of their politicians on this topic or other topics that would dramatically improve their lives. Instead they care more about vanity topics that don't even effect them.
There are 3 things always overlooked in this conversation.
- It’s not just representatives but their staff, family and friends. See the Covid scandals as an example.
- Often the information they’re privy to can come from their networks outside of government. The current transparency laws give us insights into their family members’ investments which is incredibly beneficial public knowledge.
- The current laws have no teeth and are not enforced well. Immediate disclosure should be required & automated for elected representatives, judges, family & staff within 24 hours. Late reporting should be immediate sale and loss of any profits.
If there is a bubble then the hyperscalers with dominant market shares and big cashflows are most likely to survive if it bursts. Google, MSFT and Amazon. Oracle are on very shaky ground. Their bonds are selling at a discount to par, even though interest rates are dropping, and their debt to equity ratio is nearing 400%. AI is an existential bet for them, but not so much for the others.
Not just this but the lack of diligence by companies that allow accounts to be created, bills to go unpaid & then sent to collection agencies is something that needs to change.
Speaking as someone who has had companies give away my PII and then other companies open accounts with it without contacting me until bills are due.
None of this should be the fault of innocent individuals.
You are correct and I sincerely apologize. I have always had immense respect for my conservative peers. This is something else carrying the mantle of conservative, cowing the conservatives to silence.
This gets proposed a lot. The reason it isn't more frequent is due to the cost of the structure to hold the panels & risks of people running into them.
It would be great if these costs could come down. Parking lots, animal pastures & other areas could be protected & create energy at the same time.
Here is a large installation over surface parking at a VA medical center. I think it is just a matter of time before this becomes the standard everywhere.
People drive into buildings all the time. Like it's actually like over a hundred per day sort of thing in the US. Happens really frequently here in Canada as well.
If you include stuff like stop signs, light poles, mailboxes, and fences its probably in the several thousands. Fixed object collisions are super common.
Probably ya'll need to update the driver's license exam. First, in the written exam, include rules against hitting stationary structures, and quiz them on it before issuing the learner's permit. Then also test for it during the road test. If they can't avoid a stationary structure, perhaps fail them?
In the US, this is not a problem unless you are drunk. When you are driving drunk, you are violating the law anyway.
We don't know the state of the multiple drivers to cause these posts, or for the drivers to run into the corresponding posts, but they're a) in the US (Atlanta, Oakland, and Brookfield, CT) and b) it sounds like it's happened more than a few times.
There are 2.75 - 4 billion buildings on this planet. Something will happen a few times or more than few times. Sometimes asteroids hit the planet and most species go extinct.
Even animals (with significantly smaller brains) know how to avoid stationary structures (and even moving things that are trying to eat them!).
Where are ya'll from that people are running into stationary structures all the time? If people have an epidemic of running into stationary things, wouldn't there be a 100x problem of them running into moving things - like cars, trucks, trains, airplanes?
Regardless, why is it okay for people to run into any stationary structure but not okay for people to run into structures that hold solar panels? Or is there some effort to remove ALL stationary structures because of this problem?
If you put solar panels in parking lots, you're adding a lot of posts to the parking lot to hold them that weren't there before. People are going to crash into those posts in parking lots often.
For example, light posts constantly get bumped in parking lots.
To hold your solar panels you need really strong posts that can both hold them and get bumped into by vehicles. Especially in the USA where you have giant vehicles & tight parking spaces.
This all adds to the cost before you even get to electricity storage & transmission.
Is it worth the risk/work to move everything over? For a lot of enterprises, their needs to be a huge cost savings or risk reduction. Risk usually being the most important factor the bigger the company.
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