Pragmatic Dictator

This is interesting:

“W3C members have issues surrounding enterprise computing. Not just distributed computing, but the typical concerns around transactions, scalability, high availability, and so on. Not only that they’re also dealing with 15, 20, and 25 year old technology that works just fine but is getting more and more difficult to maintain and doesn’t play well with others. Finally, there’s the issue of interconnecting these systems to each other, to partners, and to the Web.”

Once 15+ year old technology is getting difficult to maintain and doesn’t play nice with others, surely it’s time to considering throwing it out? Surely keeping it just forces all the new stuff we do to get bogged down and stifled supporting the old stuff?

I’m just wondering if the logical destination for this will be we can’t make progress any more because we get completely bogged down in our legacy? I certainly appreciate the companies holding on to so much legacy consider it important that the issue is tackled but should the rest of the world which is perhaps more flexible have to care? Should we constantly be bending all the good new stuff we do to cope with all this old crud?

If you buy a car there’s a limit to it’s useful life. You can keep running it after that but maintenance bills get higher and higher to the point where one gives up and just buys a new car because it’s cheaper.

Note also that the owner of this “legacy” car is the one suffering the high maintenance cost, not the manufacturer or the mechanic. Admittedly, the mechanic and the manufacturer must hold onto tools and parts but they can at a point of their choosing drop support. Should it not also be the case that companies holding onto legacy systems suffer similar high maintenance costs? Should these companies be able to displace those costs onto others in the form of horrendous complexity and endless legacy considerations in new products, specs etc?

Clearly there is no right answer for this dilemma but it might be time for us all to sit down and consider the whole cost of holding onto legacy which goes way beyond the simple increasing cost of maintenance.

If nothing else it strikes me as interesting that whilst IT pursues the concept of endless life for systems, nature provides many examples of limited lifespan as a useful tool for progress and sustainability.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 26th, 2007 at 1:26 pm and is filed under Enterprise Systems, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.