Bill -
Good to 'see' you again.
Interesting that Y2K believers don't apply the same skepticism to dubious claims such as the Gartner group $600 billion estimate.
From what I've seen of Gartner Group guesstimates they do a whole lot of hedging regarding the accuracy of their guesstimates.
But let's just (one again) start with the bare basics...
- 15,000 IBM MVS mainframes
- 40,000 IBM DOS/VSE midrange
- 400,000 IBM AS/400 midrange
- 500,000 DEC VAX whatever
- and we're not counting AT&T, Amdahl, Basic IV, Bull, CDC, Cray, Data General, Datapoint, Four Phase, Harris, Hitachi, Hewlett-Packard, Magnuson, NCR, Prime, Sun, Tandem, Texas Instruments, Unisys, Wang or Xerox... there's a passel of iron out there.
So the guesstimate is only $300 billion... it's still a terrific problem to make so many changes.
Remember that just in IBM/MVS space no more than 15% have even bought (we'll ignore the chasm between buying & properly implementing) a software configuration management package.
Software is a handwork cottage art form. It gets maintained one painful line of code at a time...
So what's to prove about the nastiness of the problem?
- David |
