On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 8:36 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
I spent a number of years directly in charge of spending a technology budget of size comparable to Wikimedia's.
[...]
If we assume that moore's law applies directly to price/performance (which isn't a totally outrageous assumption in many cases) money differed on technology spending has an annualized return of 60%! Thats astonishingly good: almost as good as printing money.
Sure, for new hardware purchases. But, when you were in charge of a tech budget, what percentage of that budget was spent on hardware? Servers tend to be cheap compared to people.
I guess that differs from company to company, but in the case of the WMF, Sue has suggested that a significant amount of new hardware is going to be donated by a third party.
I can't agree with Sue that not spending money until it's "needed" is a good thing, unless by "needed" she means more like "useful". But then, that must be what she means, because she agrees that finally hiring another dev is a "good thing".