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To: Tony Viola who wrote (50334)	3/9/1998 9:43:00 PM
From: Mary Cluney	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Tony, >>>Like the bumper sticker says on the clunky car "it may not look pretty, but it's paid for."<<< I am hearing a lot, anecdotally, what Michelle Harris is telling us about enterprize computing at Dell - they are living with patched up systems developed over ten - twenty years ago. It isn't that companies like Dell couldn't afford to upgrade. Nor is it because they are ignoring problems in their own back yard - internal housekeeping type of applications. I am reminded of Michael Dell's personal involvement in detail operations. As an example, to improve the quality of his product - he reduced the number of touches of hard drives (the most sensitve component and source of most problems)during assembly and improved failure rates by a good percentage. Therefore, I doubt someone like Michael Dell would let a problem with an obsolete backoffice system (that Michelle has observed) go on for very long. And, I don't think it is a matter of spending the money to make the improvements. Spending $100 to $200M dollars for a state of art system would be rather inconsequential for a company Dell's size. My own theory on this, however, is this: There is really no good road map to follow. All the choices for a hardware/software architecture would have more risks than rewards. I doubt that any CIO now would invest that kind of money on an IBM/Amdahl mainframe architecture (for a new system). High-end minicomputers and or Tandem type of hardware would be equally unattractive. Hardware using the various flavors of the Unix operating system would carry the risk of obsolesence because of the failure of the chosen OS to reach a desired critical mass. You also run the risk of maintaining three different OSes. A mainframe OS, Unix, and Wintel on the desktop. This kind of leads me to think that there is a huge pentup demand for a clear road map for an enterprise computing hardware/software architecture that uses one OS to replace the current mish mash of OSes cobbled together from over the past ten/twenty years. I wonder what this new architecture could look like? Any thoughts? Mary