50 ms·

Pick a vendor and go all in. That sounds like the perspective of someone who's picked open source vendors most of the time, or has been spoiled by the ease of

Pick a vendor and go all in. That sounds like the perspective of someone who's picked open source vendors most of the time, or has been spoiled by the ease of migrating Java, Node, or Go projects to other systems and architectures. Having worked at large enterprises and banks who went all in with, say, IBM, I have seen just how expensive true vendor lock-in can get. Don't expect a vendor to always stay competitively priced, especially once they realize a) their old model is failing, and b) everybody on their old model is quite stuck.

scarface74 8y ago
At least if you went with IBM and followed the old adage “no one ever got fired for buying IBM” in the 80s, you can still buy new supported hardware to run your old code on. If you went with their competitors, not so much.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  You certainly can, but the prices haven’t decreased (and probably increased) from their 80s values, even though the thing is now probably a dinosaur.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    Which of their competitors can you still buy new faster hardware from? Does anyone sell Stratus VOS or DEC VAX VMS compatible systems? Yeah I know I am showing my age....
    - phs318u 8y ago
      > Does anyone sell... DEC VAX VMS compatible systems? https://www.avtware.com/cloud https://www.avtware.com/cloud
      - frostburg 8y ago
        Someone should check if it can run OpenGenera.
    - shittyadmin 8y ago
      The people who designed their systems such that they could be easily transitioned off of IBM have done so long ago. Those systems now run exponentially cheaper and have access to more resources. Vendor lock-in was just as much of a problem then as now.
      - scarface74 8y ago
        Yes because people in the 80s writing COBOL were writing AbstractFactorySingletonBeans to create a facade to make their transitions to newer platforms easier....
  - da_chicken 8y ago
    IBM's prices haven't changed at all since the 80s. They're still four times as expensive as they should be.
    - peteforde 8y ago
      Sounds like you've described IBM being priced exactly right, given their tenacious longevity.
  - protomyth 8y ago
    Well, our next iSeries is a whole lot cheaper than our current iSeries and quite a bit more powerful. The Power 9 is not something I would call a dinosaur.
dijit 8y ago
I am incredulous that people wouldn't be worried about vendor lock-in when the valley already has a 900lb gorilla in the room (Oracle). Ask anybody about Oracle features, they'll tell you for days about how their feature velocity and set is great. But then ask them how much their company has been absolutely rinsed over time and how the costs increase annually. Oracle succeed by being only slightly cheaper than migrating your entire codebase. To offset this practice, keep your transition costs low. -- Personal note: I'm currently experiencing this with microsoft; all cloud providers have an exorbitant premium when it comes to running Windows on their VMs, but obviously Azure is priced very well (in an attempt to entice you to their platform). Our software has been built over a long period of time by people who have been forced to run Windows at work -- so they built it on Windows. Now we have a 30% operational overhead charged from microsoft through our cloud provider. But hey.. at least our cloud provider honours fsync().
- Twirrim 8y ago
  > all cloud providers have an exorbitant premium when it comes to running Windows on their VMs Speaking from first hand running-a-cloud-platform experience, it's because running Windows on a cloud platform is not easy, and comes with licensing costs that have to be paid to Microsoft for each running instance (plus a bunch of infrastructure to support it). It's not even a per-instance-per-time-interval cost, there's all sorts of stuff wrapped up in it and impact the effective cost. It requires a bunch of administrative work and specific coding to try to optimise the costs to the cloud provider. In addition, where Linux will happily transfer between different hardware configurations, you'll often have to have separate Windows images for each hardware configuration, so that means even more overhead on staffing both producing and supporting. So e.g. SR-IOV images, PV images, bare metal images (for each flavour of bare metal hardware), etc. While a bunch of this work can be fully automated, it's still not a trivial task, and producing that first image for a new hardware configuration can take a whole bunch of work, even where you'd think it would be trivial.
- james_s_tayler 8y ago
  I think perhaps not all vendor lock-in is created equal. I too shudder at the thought of walking into another Oracle like trap, but it's also an error in cognition to make the assumption that all vendors will lock you in to the same degree and in the same way. I guess the part of us that is cautioning ourselves and others are aware of the pitfalls, but others also have valid points around going all in. There is a matrix of different scenarios let's say. You can go all in on a vendor and get Oracled. You can go all in on an abstraction that lets you be vendor agnostic and lose some velocity while gaining flexibility. You can go for a vendor and perhaps it turns out that no terrible outcome results because of that. You can go all in on vendor agnostic and have that be the death of the company. You can go all in on vendor agnostic and have that be the reason the company was able to dodge death. Nobody can read the future and even "best practices" have a possibility of resulting in the worst outcomes. The only thing for it is to do your homework, decide what risks are acceptable to you, make your decision, take responsibility for it.
PopeDotNinja 8y ago
Vendor lock in can be expensive, but spreading yourself across vendors can also be expensive. There are lots of events that are free if you stay in the walled garden, but the second you starting pulling gigs & gigs of data from AWS S3 into GCP (or whatever), that can get pricey real fast. In general I agree with you. In practice, the more practical approach may be to focus on making more money & not fussing too much w/ vendor costs & whatever strategy you choose to use. It's easy to pay a big vendor bill when there's a bigger pile of cash from sales.
da_chicken 8y ago
> That sounds like the perspective of someone who's picked open source vendors most of the time More than that. They picked open source vendors that didn't (a) vanish in a puff of smoke, (b) get bought out by a company that slowly killed the open source version, or (c) who produced products that they were capable of supporting without the vendor (or capable of faking support for).
mathattack 8y ago
IBM is awful on the way out. So is any firm bought by Oracle or CA.

scarface74 8y ago

At least if you went with IBM and followed the old adage “no one ever got fired for buying IBM” in the 80s, you can still buy new supported hardware to run your old code on. If you went with their competitors, not so much.

Aeolun 8y ago
You certainly can, but the prices haven’t decreased (and probably increased) from their 80s values, even though the thing is now probably a dinosaur.
- scarface74 8y ago
  Which of their competitors can you still buy new faster hardware from? Does anyone sell Stratus VOS or DEC VAX VMS compatible systems? Yeah I know I am showing my age....
  - phs318u 8y ago
    > Does anyone sell... DEC VAX VMS compatible systems? https://www.avtware.com/cloud https://www.avtware.com/cloud
    - frostburg 8y ago
      Someone should check if it can run OpenGenera.
  - shittyadmin 8y ago
    The people who designed their systems such that they could be easily transitioned off of IBM have done so long ago. Those systems now run exponentially cheaper and have access to more resources. Vendor lock-in was just as much of a problem then as now.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      Yes because people in the 80s writing COBOL were writing AbstractFactorySingletonBeans to create a facade to make their transitions to newer platforms easier....
- da_chicken 8y ago
  IBM's prices haven't changed at all since the 80s. They're still four times as expensive as they should be.
  - peteforde 8y ago
    Sounds like you've described IBM being priced exactly right, given their tenacious longevity.
- protomyth 8y ago
  Well, our next iSeries is a whole lot cheaper than our current iSeries and quite a bit more powerful. The Power 9 is not something I would call a dinosaur.

dijit 8y ago

I am incredulous that people wouldn't be worried about vendor lock-in when the valley already has a 900lb gorilla in the room (Oracle). Ask anybody about Oracle features, they'll tell you for days about how their feature velocity and set is great. But then ask them how much their company has been absolutely rinsed over time and how the costs increase annually. Oracle succeed by being only slightly cheaper than migrating your entire codebase. To offset this practice, keep your transition costs low. -- Personal note: I'm currently experiencing this with microsoft; all cloud providers have an exorbitant premium when it comes to running Windows on their VMs, but obviously Azure is priced very well (in an attempt to entice you to their platform). Our software has been built over a long period of time by people who have been forced to run Windows at work -- so they built it on Windows. Now we have a 30% operational overhead charged from microsoft through our cloud provider. But hey.. at least our cloud provider honours fsync().

Twirrim 8y ago
> all cloud providers have an exorbitant premium when it comes to running Windows on their VMs Speaking from first hand running-a-cloud-platform experience, it's because running Windows on a cloud platform is not easy, and comes with licensing costs that have to be paid to Microsoft for each running instance (plus a bunch of infrastructure to support it). It's not even a per-instance-per-time-interval cost, there's all sorts of stuff wrapped up in it and impact the effective cost. It requires a bunch of administrative work and specific coding to try to optimise the costs to the cloud provider. In addition, where Linux will happily transfer between different hardware configurations, you'll often have to have separate Windows images for each hardware configuration, so that means even more overhead on staffing both producing and supporting. So e.g. SR-IOV images, PV images, bare metal images (for each flavour of bare metal hardware), etc. While a bunch of this work can be fully automated, it's still not a trivial task, and producing that first image for a new hardware configuration can take a whole bunch of work, even where you'd think it would be trivial.
james_s_tayler 8y ago
I think perhaps not all vendor lock-in is created equal. I too shudder at the thought of walking into another Oracle like trap, but it's also an error in cognition to make the assumption that all vendors will lock you in to the same degree and in the same way. I guess the part of us that is cautioning ourselves and others are aware of the pitfalls, but others also have valid points around going all in. There is a matrix of different scenarios let's say. You can go all in on a vendor and get Oracled. You can go all in on an abstraction that lets you be vendor agnostic and lose some velocity while gaining flexibility. You can go for a vendor and perhaps it turns out that no terrible outcome results because of that. You can go all in on vendor agnostic and have that be the death of the company. You can go all in on vendor agnostic and have that be the reason the company was able to dodge death. Nobody can read the future and even "best practices" have a possibility of resulting in the worst outcomes. The only thing for it is to do your homework, decide what risks are acceptable to you, make your decision, take responsibility for it.

PopeDotNinja 8y ago

Vendor lock in can be expensive, but spreading yourself across vendors can also be expensive. There are lots of events that are free if you stay in the walled garden, but the second you starting pulling gigs & gigs of data from AWS S3 into GCP (or whatever), that can get pricey real fast. In general I agree with you. In practice, the more practical approach may be to focus on making more money & not fussing too much w/ vendor costs & whatever strategy you choose to use. It's easy to pay a big vendor bill when there's a bigger pile of cash from sales.

da_chicken 8y ago

> That sounds like the perspective of someone who's picked open source vendors most of the time More than that. They picked open source vendors that didn't (a) vanish in a puff of smoke, (b) get bought out by a company that slowly killed the open source version, or (c) who produced products that they were capable of supporting without the vendor (or capable of faking support for).

mathattack 8y ago

IBM is awful on the way out. So is any firm bought by Oracle or CA.