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That's not the way I interpret 're-inventing the wheel.' I don't see it as the next gen thinking they are smarter, but rather questioning the assumptions built

That's not the way I interpret 're-inventing the wheel.' I don't see it as the next gen thinking they are smarter, but rather questioning the assumptions built into the last gen. Mainframes vs Distributed (cloud, kubernetes, etc) systems have different behaviors at different scales and are useful for different kinds of applications and business sizes. A perfect example is the startup economy. I can spool up a service for a few hundred people essentially for free, but still have the ability to scale if things catch on and I need to serve hundreds of thousands. That same scaling using old technologies would be a lot less smooth. I mean, even if we do assume each new tech fad is mostly driven by hubris, if the results benefit the ecosystem, which cloud undoubtedly has through democratizing scalability, so what? As far as the secret keeping of industry, I don't by that at all. I've worked for a diverse set of organizations, and every single one of them wanted to either trumpet their own practices to build clout with developers, or utilize knowledge in the public domain so that talent was easier to find. If anything companies avoid having secret sauce in their infra at all costs.

npsimons 6y ago
So yes, the spread of powerful computing certainly is to be lauded. I'm not denying that, but I feel it's more to do with a driving down of costs than anything. If (and I admit that's a big if) big iron vendors had paid attention and not rested on their laurels, I truly believe they could have easily morphed into "cloud" providers, and possibly even brought it on sooner, like a decade earlier. But the activity of keeping secrets is still with us, even in this age of widespread FLOSS. Just look up how many software patents are still held. It's no good trumpeting your organization's advantages if everyone has the same advantages.

npsimons 6y ago

So yes, the spread of powerful computing certainly is to be lauded. I'm not denying that, but I feel it's more to do with a driving down of costs than anything. If (and I admit that's a big if) big iron vendors had paid attention and not rested on their laurels, I truly believe they could have easily morphed into "cloud" providers, and possibly even brought it on sooner, like a decade earlier. But the activity of keeping secrets is still with us, even in this age of widespread FLOSS. Just look up how many software patents are still held. It's no good trumpeting your organization's advantages if everyone has the same advantages.