[rescue] ham gear

[velociraptor]

On 12/5/05, Ethan O'Toole <ethan at 757tech.net> wrote:
> > Google is the ultimate example of success in the marketplace as a
> > result of doing just this.  If you have too much COTS on your resume
> > (at least as far as IT folk go), forget being considered.  They want
> > those that prefer to roll their own (not just can).
>
> Google has a very large bankroll and a nosebleed stock. You can't possibly
> expect everyone to have that kind of money and resources. A victim of
> their own success, if you can't find it on google try search.yahoo.com.
> It's amazing what you might be missing.

(This is not a political discussion about the merits of one search engine
over another--that is irrelevant to the discussion about the economy of
OSS/custom solution vs COTS.  Regardless of what you think about
the quality of Google's search results, they are making money as a
company, and from what I can tell, have no problems hiring people.)

Yahoo is going the same direction as Google, in terms of custom
development and use of OSS.  Likewise, Amazon, though they do still
use Oracle on the backend.  The majority of their solutions are home-
grown, and pretty much all of it runs on Deadrat.  They are also
eliminating some of the M$ on the desktop side as well.

Are there any multi-billion-dollar e-commerce sites still running on
Sun/Solaris other than eBay/Paypal and Cisco?

And, yes, this glosses the cost of integration.  But the advantage of
internal development of your own software is that it becomes one more
piece of IP that a company can then leverage by selling to others in
one form or another.

I won't argue about "right tool for the job"--yes, it's stupid to reinvent
the wheel if a COTS solution gives you 80% of what you need.  But
if you are out in the wilds, sometimes you have to build what you need
from scratch.

=Nadine=