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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

If you have a stable setup that does not need changes as you grow, chances are you're not growing fast enough, or at all.

New and thus inherently unstable things may allow order of magnitude jumps in efficiency, and, again, getting onto a growth trajectory.

Dropping VMS and Solaris in 1997 and switching to Linux was switching from stable software and hardware to unstable, but such that had a growth potential. Switching from bare metal and colocation to AWS in 2009, the same. Switching from highly advanced ICE to electric motors and huge lithium batteries in 2007, the same.

If all that you value is stability [ed: of your setup], the amount of wealth you own will also stay the same, at best. Stable things need to be stepping stones into the unstable, uncertain future that may bring something bigger.

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From direct experience, instability and uncertainty less to your customers getting angry on twitter and fucking off rather quickly. All they want is to do what they did yesterday without being poked in the eye.

The whole move fast, break things and grow quickly is a cancer that compromises everything not a commercial win. When you put yourself before your customers you fucked up.

At a practical level, this is NetBSD story is a story of a machine that just does it's job and doesn't change. For example, there is no active experimentation, no machine learning added on, etc. It's like a wood-mill; good that it make 2x4s but also not a highly dynamic business. Probably not a business that's seen a lot of competition or having to adapt to changing markets and products.

I'm not talking about breaking things and having downtime.

I'm saying that if you have the same infrastructure over 13 years, and you did not have to upgrade it, or replace its parts, or even migrate off it, you're likely not growing.

All the above things can be done with minimal disruption for the customers, ideally in a completely transparent way.

Perhaps you don’t need to grow? Growth is not the only business model. I mean failing to do maintenance is a sin of course but anything else, there is no one true course.

I originally answered to a comment about never becoming rich. No growth means not getting rich, this is what I'm trying to point at.

Of course growth and getting rich is not the only worthy target. Say, OSS is not about getting rich, but it's wonderful and worthy without doubt, in my eyes.

I know of at least one semiconductor company pushing the state of the art on 1990s litho processes, running 1990s control software on their stepper that runs on Solaris on SPARC32 (SPARcstation 5). Anecdotal, but their production engineers have stated that not relearning how to use critical parts of their process every few years has helped them stay focused on actual R&D.

This is of course an extreme, probably unusual example.

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