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Comment by jmacd | Hacker News Reader

Hilarious that IBM still thinks of the enterprise as the arbiter of quality. Consumer is now setting the defacto standards, including on things like information security.

IBM's days of having a voice in that conversation are probably more limited than they realize.

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would you car to give some exampled ? My opinion is that the enterprise is a somewhat separate ecosystem. Thus "enterprise-ready" -ready is not a mark of quality, it's a mark of belonging to the enterprise ecosystem.

I'm wondering what makes swift ready for the enterprise ecosystem. It barely seems to meet the requirements of the "enthusiastic consumer" outside of Apple OS.

To be ready for the enterprise ecosystem basically means that you can sue someone if things go wrong, and you can buy support packages for enormous sums of money. IBM is saying that you can 1) buy bluemix swift from them, and 2) sue them if anything goes wrong - but since they have a great legal team, they probably got ironclad agreements ready to go.

> sue them if anything goes wrong

Cool! https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/sep/23/austr...

I thought stability of the ecosystem (i.e. stable standard library) was also a "must" for adoption by the enterprise. Never thought that a language in flux with "hosting" support from IBM is enough. But now it seems the enterprise world is eager to try the coolest thing and rewrite/refactor it after the next release as long as someone will host/run it.

Now that you enlightened me I can see the stock markets, hospitals, banks and all enterprise consumers embracing Swift and eager to upgrade once Swift 4 is released.

Java and Smalltalk both benefited from IBM support.

However, Smalltalk later suffered when Visual Age for Smalltalk became Eclipse and IBM switched focus to just Java.

IBM's BlueBix et al was a direct result of the purchase of Rackspace, which was strategic buy to hedge against the growth market of Amazon and it's bazillion EC2-esque offerings. (Likely in response to seeing Amazon's success, almost strategically similar to why Azure and Google's App Service or whatever exist.)

They're still making money hand over fist in maintenance keeping the mainframes up (your state's DMV won't move off MVS/zOS as long as support for their old JCL/REXX stuff is still available, especially those 'cheap' z13s which come in at under 100k) but that's an entirely different tier of customer.

Maybe you mean softlayer. As far as I know Rackspace was recently bought out by someone else. I understand IBM wants to be cool but it doesn't make sense to promote an immature technology as enterprise ready...

It's not about having someone to sue it's about attracting blame.

Blame assignment isn't really about who made good decisions, or who worked hard, or any of that, it's a combination of how bad it went and who made uncommon choices:

common choice + failure = external blame (who could have seen it coming?)

uncommon choice + failure = it's your fault for doing it weird

common choice + success = great job!

uncommon choice + success = I don't trust you, but you might be a genius

Since hierarchical relationships function using blame ("responsibility"), making predictable decisions becomes more important than making good decisions at some depth of hierarchy.

This is probably the most important comment in this thread. Being able to delegate blame out to $common-choice on project failures is the difference between that CIO being able to say "hey, not my fault, I bought the Oracle platinum integration package!" to satisfy the board rather than "sorry guys, I really thought my node.js idea would work, it's all the rage with the kids! Haven't you ever heard of Slack?!"

(If this sounds strange to you, just replace "node.js" with "Rails 2" and you'll see why ASP.NET and Java's still king in any company with a market cap > 100MM && age > 20 years. It's about continuity of support, and Windows 2016 servers can still run ASP Classic and .NET 2 WebForms apps just fine.)

"Responsibility" == risk mitigation for that purchasing authority.

Slack is PHP and Jquery, no nodejs AFAIK.

> common choice + failure = external blame (who could have seen it coming?)

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"

IBM have had some high-profile stuff-ups in Australia. Good luck to them being taken seriously over here with almost anything they say nowadays.

My experience is that managers don't care.

really you do know the difference between a consumer product and carrier grade equipment. Apple abandoned the enterprise years ago and arguably anything larger than small boutique businesses.

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