Posted inInformation Technology / Investing

What if Microsoft Made Refrigerators?

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek

This question came up today.  Actually it came up a while back and I finally looked at the message today.  What if Microsoft made refrigerators?  The question is an apt one for business systems which is why so few MBAs think to ask it.

If Microsoft made refrigerators they would periodically require a manual reboot, everything in them would spoil and you would just accept that.  Well, you would accept it until you found out the CDC or some other lab was keeping deadly viruses isolated in those same machines.

The question surfaced during yet another discussion of OpenVMS cluster up-times.  For those of you unfamiliar with the serious business platform, this is the platform where 19 years of 24×7 availability isn’t an oddity.  When it comes to OpenVMS clusters, having one which has been rebooted in the past 5 years is the oddity.

OpenVMS is the platform of choice for companies planning to still be in business 25 years from now.  What does your company run?  Time to update the resume`.

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.