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To expand on that, lack of awareness of the problem space and lack of knowledge of the specifics involved. And I think the latter is a huge barrier. From what
by ethbro 11y ago
To expand on that, lack of awareness of the problem space and lack of knowledge of the specifics involved. And I think the latter is a huge barrier.
From what I've seen (relatively minimal), industrial automation tends to be incredibly bespoke. E.g. we had consultant X from Y integrator (sometimes now defunct) come in Z years ago (where Z is always > 10) and set up this system: we've been using it as a black box without change since.
In short the "Linux on the desktop" problem - the burden of having to support 1,000+ unique configurations, each with their own edge case behaviors (or outright bugs). And from what I've seen, the ideal startup growth pattern doesn't fit with a services "send one engineer out to an account to custom fix it" way of doing things.
- jackcosgrove 11y ago"we had consultant X from Y integrator (sometimes now defunct) come in Z years ago (where Z is always > 10) and set up this system: we've been using it as a black box without change since" This is accurate and it stems from the proprietary technologies that integrators must sew together. Want to build a better Siemens Step 7 IDE? Get a job at Siemens.
- ethbro 11y agoI think ultimately it stems from lack of source code ownership / use of open platforms / clearly defined interfaces. Best case, with clearly documented and defined interfaces, you can rewrite or swap out an entire component. Worst case, you have no source, no standard technologies, and no interface barriers, in which case your choices are leave as-is (no additional features) or replace everything (impractical due to size of codebase / legacy functionality coverage).