Cost of IT vs Revenue

[Jose Lerebours]

On 12/4/21 4:06 AM, Fairlight via Filepro-list wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 03, 2021 at 09:57:59AM -0500, Jose Lerebours via Filepro-list thus spoke:
>> I'll be damn if it is not about $$$ - and if it is not about $$$, then the
>> parties responsible for making sure stability, integrity and
>> accessibility of application are not doing their job!
> Your entire argument falls apart when you stop to consider that both
> MySQL/MariaDB and Postgres are freely available at no cost.
They are free but there is a cost to maintain/host them and you should not
neglect the server on which you do so.


>> Whatever happened to 2% of your revenue should be invested in technology?
> Where the hell did you get that number, and did you wipe it off between
> pulling it out of somewhere, and putting it on the list?
Oh, is it higher now?  One can find many references as to how industries 
normally draw budget
for their various departments, IT included ... here is a sample of that


https://www.computereconomics.com/article.cfm?id=2626

If this is not a factual/real expectation, I have been privileged to 
have worked with reasonable
budgets for companies large and small.

>
>> Mind you, this is not to say that the application needs to be replaced,
>> re-written but at least its foundation must be up-to-date and
>> par with available technologies to secure a minimum down time (if any) and
>> reliable redundancy.
> Oh, dear God.  You're just venturing into the realms of silliness at
> this point.
>
> Once something is written, if it's stable and just purrs like a kitten
> 24/7/365 (like...oh, I don't know...my OneGate, RawQuery, LightMail,
> etc.), there's nothing left to do with it 99.9% of the time.  Once
> you're done adding features (I am hard-pressed to think of anything
> useful to add to OneGate), there's just no reason to tinker with the
> stack for the hell of it.
>
> The most I've had to do with RawQuery has been to supply new binaries at
> various points, and only because the binary distributions were compiled
> against older libopenssl distributions, which means that when you need TLS
> 1.2, that decade-old compile isn't going to work anymore for the current
> landscape.  Not a line of the application code changes; it's building a
> new build environment and recompiling.  And honestly, I stopped supplying
> binaries for anything but Windows.  Used to supply Linux binaries, but I'm
> content to just forego DRM and supply it in script form.  Even my most
> souped up SuperQuery program, with full-on threading, batch mode which
> shrinks time taken by up to 91%, and segmented downloading is supplied in
> script form.

Mark, no offense, none of these are "applications" in the sense that they

are used to run an entire business, they are, what in my neck of the 
woods are
called "plug ins, patches, add-on, extensions ..." ...

Any one programmer that says that he/she has not have the need to
make any changes to his/her application, one would have to wonder if the 
business
where said application is being used has:

1. Added new business (customers, vendors ...)
2. Evolved with the times
3. Added new means to gain business and/or compete with emerging 
competitors

The only reason why you are able to make $$$ with these (listed above), 
is because
filePro is not able to "natively" solve what you claim to do so 
flawlessly and so, your
solutions are adopted and added as "add-on" to filePro "applications" 
... this very act
is a "change" to the application or likely will require a change.

>
> Updating for the sake of spending money is a waste of money.  I'll
> update programs in my VST collection, but that's when they do sensible
> things like add features I want/need.  I don't chase the annual revenue
> stream releases unless the feature sets for the specific release are
> compelling.  Used to upgrade Camtasia no matter what, from 4 through 6.
> The feaures for 7 and a few others were not compelling enough to justify
> the expense.  iZotope got greedy, and I've started skipping multiple
> years.  I only update Komplete Ultimate from NI once every 2-4 versions,
> and only when they include new tools in the collection.

Why would anyone update just for the sake of spending money?

Where/how did I suggest anyone should do that?

If saying that one should maintain up-to-date foundations to keep your 
application
from crumbling is what you are eluting to!?! then, yes, I did say that.

> If no compatibility issues are introduced, and if there's no UI issue
> 'introduced' by technological progress (like, for instance, scalable UIs
> because you can't fucking read static tiny font sizes from pre-4K on UHD
> displays), there's simply no good reason to part with the money.  I'd
> rather buy a new guitar, synth, gun, gaming console, etc.

What if you need to launch a marketing campaign and need to setup
means to do all of it digitally, setup hooks to monitor/track responses
and produce forecasting reports and alert your procurement department
of a wave of new business or loss of business?

Oh wait, this would normally be done on a different application so it must
be someone else's problem.

New business potential often opens the need for new applications, added
applications or changes to existing application.  If this was not the 
case, the
likes of you and I would have written but "one" application in our life 
time.


>> Personally, I stopped fighting cloud based servers a long time ago and I do
>> not miss the days where I had to worry about servers,
>> power surges and COMCAST keeping their service up and running.
>
>
> You're seriously starting to sound like you have more money than brains,
> and then decided to be rude because others value their time and money more
> than you do yours...or theirs.
>
> Trust me when I say you can find worthier hills to die on than the one
> you're currently defending.
>
> m->

Rude?  I fail to see where/how I was being rude and if I were, I 
apologize for that was not my intend.

Per having $$$ vs Brains, given my not so abundant level of 
thinking/analytical power, I will simply
assume that this was not a well intended offensive shot.

Forgive me but, I am of the believe that software should never be static 
and that applications should
serve the business needs without forcing the companies to change their 
preferred or set SOP as set.

Granted, there will be exceptions where companies will have to make 
changes to adopt new technologies but,
this goes to the point where "technology" carries a cost/investment and 
periodic changes are need to
keep up to date.

One could keep going back and forth arguing wining/loosing points about 
how much money should be
allocated towards technology and if a well written application should 
stay as written without changes or
enhancements ... to me, if a company uses an application for 30+ years 
and this application has not gone
through any changes in that period, the company, however successful, has 
not evolved or it is in a very
unique industry where changes are rare to non-existent.

[ ]
|

this is my representation of a "white flag" ... you win!


-- 
Jose Lerebours
954-559-7186
https://www.asisuites.com
Accounting - Retail - Wholesale - Distribution
Manufacturing - Warehousing - Transportation - eCommerce - Web Development