On 11/1/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
Fastfission wrote:
<snip> > My purely speculative guess is that -- like large universities and > other slow-to-change bureaucracies which have no profit motive, tight > funds, and no customer-feedback systems -- they think in terms of > big, uniform solutions that cost lots of money, are hard to upgrade, > and are centrally controlled. >
On the contrary, universities *do* have profit motives, money available, and customer feedback systems. They still use big, uniform solutions that cost lots of money, are hard to upgrade, and are centrally controlled, but they generally manage to upgrade things at the end of each academic year.
They do have the summer to make upgrades, unlike most 24x7x365.35 government institutions.
That said, at one point I worked for someone closely involved with the N-1th US Internal Revenue Service major systems upgrade, and that was approximately criminally mishandled.