Software-Defined Data Centers Might Cost Companies More Than They Save

storagedude writes "As more and more companies move to virtualized, or software-defined, data centers, cost savings might not be one of the benefits. Sure, utilization rates might go up as resources are pooled, but if the end result is that IT resources become easier for end users to access and provision, they might end up using more resources, not less. That's the view of Peder Ulander of Citrix, who cites the Jevons Paradox, a 150-year-old economic theory that arose from an observation about the relationship between coal efficiency and consumption. Making a resource easier to use leads to greater consumption, not less, says Ulander. As users can do more for themselves and don't have to wait for IT, they do more, so more gets used. The real gain, then, might be that more gets accomplished as IT becomes less of a bottleneck. It won't mean cost savings, but it could mean higher revenues."

Comments

IT the bottleneck?

[cosm]

GTFO.

Re:IT the bottleneck?

[LordLucless]

Yes. That doesn't mean that it's IT's fault. At my current workplace, we have 150+ people, and 2 IT people. Getting stuff through IT is slow. However, the problem isn't with IT - they don't get to set their own budget.

Re:IT the bottleneck?

[OhANameWhatName]

At my current workplace, we have 150+ people, and 2 IT people

As time marches on, people are becoming more IT literate and IT is becoming more people literate. In 20 years, those 2 IT people will be sitting in the basement playing Halo 16 justifying their existence by requiring a backup person to hold the passwords for the network infrastructure.

Re:IT the bottleneck?

[Zaelath]

As time marches on, people are becoming more IT literate

Hahahaha

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Re:IT the bottleneck?

[plover]

Sure, IT's the bottleneck. Why? Because users who roll their own solution without understanding what they're creating will create a fragile business model.

Andy Accountant decides to do General Ledger on Quickbooks, while Polly Payables decides to do billing on the bank's web server. How does one update the other? It starts out as a manual process. But let's say Polly is clever and signs up for IFTTT.com to automate the integration. She also hands the task of entering the bills over to Carlos Clerical. Later, when Polly is on vacation, Andy downloads an upgrade to Quickbooks - but IFTTT was set up only to modify the original Quickbooks. Now Polly's billing doesn't work, and Carlos has no idea what's going on. Polly is the only support person, but she's on vacation. Andy only knows about the manual processes, so he can't help Carlos. So the bills don't get paid.

And the IT guy only knows about the PCs, the printers, the network, and the file server. He doesn't know about the apps, because the users got tired of waiting for him and rolled their own.

Repeat this scene for each and every system, service, and person involved with computers in the organization. It starts out easy and fast, but the dependencies quickly crust over every activity the company performs. Support becomes a nightmare, and changes go from "difficult" to "impossible".

If the IT guy put the pieces together, he (should) document the connections, provide troubleshooting knowledge, and at least know who to call for support. At least that's the theory.

Re:IT the bottleneck?

[E-Rock]

The problem is that a TB of enterprise class storage (and backup) isn't $100.

Re:IT the bottleneck?

[Billly Gates]

Yes. That doesn't mean that it's IT's fault. At my current workplace, we have 150+ people, and 2 IT people. Getting stuff through IT is slow. However, the problem isn't with IT - they don't get to set their own budget.

What do they do all day? Browse slashdot?!

I just left a company where we had 2.5 (one was part time) doing I.T for 1,300 users! I left because users had to wait 10+ days to get a response sometimes and always yelled at me while I worked for free off the clock not to get fired.

If we can handle this with an average response time of 7 business days then why can't your company do so with 1/10 the demands? ... maybe I should ask where you work as I could be relieved not to have ulcers?

Re:IT the bottleneck?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Well, it's not the IT people, rather the Information Technology part."

Cost savings are irrelevant when the data centre operators are outright price-gouging.

The world’s largest tech companies have failed to justify their Australian pricing regimes, with a 12-month government inquiry into the matter finding that Australians pay more for products for little to no legitimate reason. In a report, the committee found that Australians pay anywhere between 50 to 100 per cent more for IT-related goods than our overseas counterparts.

http://www.businessspectator.com.au/news/2013/7/29/technology/it-price-inquiry-spells-out-australia-tax

Re:IT the bottleneck?

[JanneM]

If you had a response time of a week for issues, and you had to work enough unpaid overtime that you left rather than facing an intolerable work situation then quite obviously you were not able to handle it with the staffing at hand.

Re:IT the bottleneck?

[LordLucless]

If we can handle this with an average response time of 7 business days then why can't your company do so with 1/10 the demands? ... maybe I should ask where you work as I could be relieved not to have ulcers?

Yeah, waiting a week to get an expired password reset is precisely what I mean when I say going through IT is slow.

Re:IT the bottleneck?

[hawguy]

A car analogy:

This is the same type of BS that the city I live in uses so they don't have to build or expand any roads, "Well, traffic will just be as bad even after we get the highway built, so why bother?"

It's true. Once they build a new highway into town, people will build houses farther away on the other end of the expanded highway, so the new highway just fuels more suburban sprawl, so it causes more congestion inside the city and for drivers closer to the city where it may not be possible to build more roads at all. Or, in areas without a major population center, it can encourage job centers to spring up along the highway, which is difficult to serve with cost effective transit as people are forced to commute farther and farther to get to their jobs.

By not building the roads, they implicitly encourage more high density, transit friendly development closer to the city.

In general, a new highway is a temporary (and expensive) solution to a traffic problem.

Re:IT the bottleneck?

[bored]

Yah, and that is why the "cloud" providers are less expensive. Do you really think there is a 7 figure EMC sitting behind an amazon storage node?

No! see apples to oranges again. For some reason its ok, for the cloud provider to run on cheezy hardware missing most of the "enterprise" features, but its not OK for random company to buy similar hardware.

Re:IT the bottleneck?

[bored]

Yah, and 5 seconds tells you there is a difference between building a giant highway going into the farmland and adding a few extra lanes to a road running through the middle of downtown.

The former is actually pretty easy/inexpensive, while the latter is expensive and difficult. Yet, the former actually gets done all the time, even though it actually makes the traffic worse.

The worse part is "encouraging" alternative methods of transport really don't work until they hit critical mass. All over the southern and Midwestern US the public transportation is the only thing worse than the garbage roads. You have bike lanes that are used by a couple dozen people, while a few thousand are stuck sitting in their idling cars... Or buses that stop to pick up one person blocking 10 or 15 cars for a minute or more while they fumble for their pass...

Re:IT the bottleneck?

[theshowmecanuck]

We allowed a senior developer to manage his own AWS EC2 instance for development of a server. Then we noticed a few hundred gigs of data were moving through the server when he wasn't around. We shut it down and audited it. There were ports and security vulnerabilities exposed that just shouldn't have been, because he had set it up to be easy for development etc etc etc. The IT bottleneck was removed. So was a good chunk of money from the company paying for some people at a number of Chinese IP addresses to move data through our servers (that costs on cloud services ya know). Just because people know how to make things work, doesn't mean they know how to do so safely. Nor does it mean they have the inclination to learn to do it safely either. I don't like data Nazis any more than the rest. But they serve a purpose that no-one else is willing to take on. Let the average computer users control things, and your company will be fucked.

Re:IT the bottleneck?

[hawguy]

Yah, and that is why the "cloud" providers are less expensive. Do you really think there is a 7 figure EMC sitting behind an amazon storage node?

No! see apples to oranges again. For some reason its ok, for the cloud provider to run on cheezy hardware missing most of the "enterprise" features, but its not OK for random company to buy similar hardware.

Companies want to see the big Netapp or EMC name on the array so they can trust that the manufacturer knows what they are doing enough that their data is safe. Amazon and Google can get away with using cheap commodity hardware because they *are* the big name, and people trust that they can keep their data safe, so they don't need to turn around and buy hardware from the big storage vendors.

Are cloud providers really much cheaper? An entry level Netapp FAS2240 with 12TB of disk costs around $16K

Amazon charges $0.095/GB/month, or $1140/month for 12TB. So after 14 months on Amazon, you could have bought a local array.

You still have to back up (or replicate) the data from the local array, so that's not a true apples-to-apples comparison (assuming that you trust S3 enough that you don't keep your own backup of the data). a 12TB array is pretty small so you don't get much economy of scale, so once you get into the larger arrays with 100's of TB, I think the numbers swing farther away from S3 for corporate storage.

Re:IT the bottleneck?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's why IT doesn't use those 100 buck 1TB hard drives: http://serverfault.com/questions/263694/why-is-enterprise-storage-so-expensive/263695#263695

Re:IT the bottleneck?

[uncqual]

But, keeping three copies of the data on cheap hardware, one of which is hundreds of miles away and having a couple other data centers to which the data migrates in seconds and minutes is within the scope of a cloud provider -- just business as usual (the exact number of data centers and copies is irrelevant as they depend on this years stats for the low cost hardware - it's all statistics).

A business whose business isn't to maintain ten(s) of data centers and manage them for redundancy may not be willing (nor, probably, should they) to pay for that level of redundancy just for their own ten terabytes of important data (their business is making innovative widgets efficiently, not managing geographically distributed data centers, each with a connection to at least two independent power sources plus backup generators).

If a midsized business making drywall needed another car to transport a sale person, would they build an auto plant to build that car? No, they would lease the car from a business whose business was leasing cars (and providing replacement cars and maintenance) and who, in turn, bought them from a specialist in designing and making cars (Toyota for example).

Re:IT the bottleneck?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can give you a counter example. We had a Cloud Ops team that had the task to exactly prevent this stuff you described.
Great. Except, they didn't even know how to set an EC2 instance with EBS. Also they couldn't provide the EC2 instance types that were needed.
So in the end, we just worked around them. Instead of taking *days* to explain them what we needed, we had our EC2 instance running in 5min exactly how we needed it.

Re:IT the bottleneck?

[CadentOrange]

Someone once said that Europeans view time the way Americans view distance; 50 years is nothing to one, 50 miles is nothing to the other.

It's not always possible to cycle and still be productive at the other end.

Re:IT the bottleneck?

[SuricouRaven]

They are becoming just IT literate enough to be a problem.

Any idiot can set up their own department server now. But that idiot won't know how to configure firewall rules, stop unneeded services or make sure patches are up-to-date.

Any idiot can move their data around on USB sticks and dropbox - and this will greatly increase productivity, as they subvert the frustrating demands of IT to keep all confidential data within the office and start catching-up at home and on the commute too. Until someone loses the stick or has their laptop stolen, leaving half your customer database floating around the street somewhere.

Re:IT the bottleneck?

[ACE209]

If a midsized business making drywall needed another car to transport a sale person, would they build an auto plant to build that car?

A bit over the top. Better comparision would be between buying the car and leasing the car.

Re:IT the bottleneck?

[MickLinux]

Our company moved to Microsoft Cloud, and user rates plummeted. Everything became uselessly slow, the good spreadsheets can't even be opened by cloud services, the app forces you into the online Outlookwhich is better performed by the local ap, data limits are sometimes a bottleneck, and basically we ended up using it for end-of-the-week backup.

To get things done, we depend on email and thumbdirves.

Oh, and we fired our IT guy, and then started paying him as a contractor.

So we are experiencing the opposite of what the article says.

Re:IT the bottleneck?

[Bert64]

The problem is that the IT dept is becoming less IT literate...
The industry has expanded very rapidly, and demand for skilled people has massively outpaced demand. This is then coupled with vendors who try to claim their products don't require highly skilled staff to manage them.

Also as you point out, people are becoming more IT literate but this can be dangerous, as these people often think they know a lot more than they really do and are prone to breaking things. These are also the kind of people who try to move into IT and become cheap but barely competent staff.

And a lot of problems aren't down to budget, more competent staff can do more with less resources... It is incompetent staff who will just try to throw money at a problem rather than studying the issue properly.

I long for the days when the IT dept was staffed by geeks who understood the technology and had enough of a keen interest in it to spend their free time learning about new technologies. Now you get an IT dept full of suits who learned what little they know on a few short courses and have no interest in learning anything new.

Re:IT the bottleneck?

[jellomizer]

Good old corporate Ego getting in the way of running business again.

When ever I hear the word Enterprise class, I tend to cringe, as an MBA myself, the term Enterprise class means, It is more expensive, so you should think it is that much better.

If they let their egos aside. And really look objectively at the specs you tend to find a bell curve in quality. The "enterprise class stuff" tends to be 1 Standard Deviation better in quality. However it price is exponentially higher. It is often cheaper to get 2 or 3 Middle Quality (MBA speak it is "Consumer Grade") and replace them when they fail. As you will probably be replacing drives about 25% more. However the difference in cost means you will have a lower total cost of ownership. Even with additional expensive staff.

However these organizations think they need the best. So they waste money on this stuff although it may not perform that much better.

Re:IT the bottleneck?

[jeffmeden]

Nope. More roads doesn't push people out. More roads let people buy cheaper land. The problem is land price, not roads. If downtown houses were as large and cheap as those 40 miles away, then nobody would sprawl. Fix the housing availability, and you fix traffic. But no, we get the anti-road nazis demanding bad traffic to punish those who choose cars, and no solution to someone who wants a 3-bedroom house with a yard large enough for a trampoline in a good school zone. Just make them change their minds by crippling the schools and transportation system until they live 5 to a room near work as the only way to survive.

God bless the 3rd world we call the USA.

Desirable land is desirable... Get used to it, there is no "fix" for every one downtown wanting a huge house on half an acre. Have you noticed how rarely it is that new land is produced? And how often it is that new greedy d-bags are produced? You can hopefully infer that this will be happening from now until forever.

Re:IT the bottleneck?

[Jawnn]

I can give you a counter example. We had a Cloud Ops team that had the task to exactly prevent this stuff you described. Great. Except, they didn't even know how to set an EC2 instance with EBS. Also they couldn't provide the EC2 instance types that were needed. So in the end, we just worked around them. Instead of taking *days* to explain them what we needed, we had our EC2 instance running in 5min exactly how we needed it.

Whoever picked/assigned that team failed, because the "team" obviously lacked the skill set required to do the job, just like the developer in GP's example lacked those skills. That's and argument for better training, but hardly an argument for placing the management of IT resources in the hands of end users.

Re:IT the bottleneck?

[MrMickS]

Well, it's not the IT people, rather the Information Technology part.

Sorry, but frequently its the people.

- Its those people that are in IT because its a career that will earn them a living rather than because they have a gift for it.
- Its those people that blindly follow rules because they only know how, they don't now why.
- Its those people who only have round peg and try to use it to fill every hole whatever the shape.
- Its those people that decide to implement things from scratch rather than build on experience gathered elsewhere.
- Its those people that are more concerned with staying in their job so pick the safe solution rather than the optimal one.
- Its those people that have caused ITIL to be necessary.

Get rid of the majority of people that are working in IT for the wrong reasons and things would work better.

Feel free to substitute IT with any other skilled profession. It holds true for most of them.

Re:IT the bottleneck?

[plover]

I'm not disputing anything you say about the slowness of the project process, or even the potentially corrupt selection process. It can take years for an IT shop to make some of those simple ideas happen. And that doesn't say anything about the size of the shop, either. Even a large well-staffed shop can take many months just to get a new project on their priority list, let alone completed.

Did anyone look at Polly's solution to figure out the ROI, or if it is worth the risk? Did she save $20 of labor per week by outsourcing it to a $50 per week service? Is she costing the company $1,000 per year in downtime because of her ill-thought-out home grown system? Has she planned for upgrades to the other systems? Did anyone review the security of her solution? Polly's not an IT project manager, so she doesn't even know all the decisions that should be considered.

One good thing about a big, slow, IT-based process is that the people who own the business can look at all the projects competing for resources and decide "this one will make the most money, do it first," "this one will only save the accountants 5 minutes per day, do it last," and "this one is too high of a risk - don't do it." It's their money - they get to decide how to spend it.

Re:IT the bottleneck?

[jellomizer]

Well be sure not to get the Cheap stuff as well. There is a sweet spot in the middle where you get the best bang for the buck.

That said if you have external backups and you mission critical of some data isn't that high where you need it now always. You probably could get by with using cheap stuff and restore from backup if it fails, sure it may take a day to get it back out. But information such as financials information doesn't need to be there all the time for most organizations. But there within a few days you need it.

Re:IT the bottleneck?

[Rakishi]

I'm sure that's what my company was thinking when they bought low level un-managed switches for our office.

Then someone created loop when plugging in a router. Stupid switch couldn't detect it and couldn't be remotely managed. We had no network for 2 days as the IT guy had to be flown in to figure it out. Forty people basically doing nothing for 8 hours and barely doing anything for another 8. Including the sales staff who couldn't do demos. I'm sure you you can do the math on how much that cost with that MBA degree of yours.

Saving $100 on a switch cost the company a lot more in lost revenue and sales.

All those little slows downs and inefficiencies and failures add up to a lot of lost time and money. When I spend an hour dicking around with the shitty wifi router you bought that's an hour you're paying me to not do my job.

And low-calorie foods cause obesity

[mysidia]

Because when people read the label and see that the food is lower calorie or "more healthy"; they eat a larger amount of the food because they feel less guilty due to it being "more healthy"; and the additional consumption more than offsets the decrease in calorie count of the "healthier food"

So eating lower calorie foods makes you less healthy....

Re:And low-calorie foods cause obesity

[khasim]

As users can do more for themselves and don't have to wait for IT, they do more, so more gets used. The real gain, then, might be that more gets accomplished as IT becomes less of a bottleneck.

As with your calorie example, you won't end up with more work being "accomplished".

You'll end up with more fat.

Look! I can record HD video and upload it to the data center and then embed it in my Power Point presentation and then email it to everyone as an attachment. With just a few clicks. Instantly.

Right now most of the people I deal with are more interested in the fonts on a document rather than the content of the document (which they will rarely read in the first place).

Re:And low-calorie foods cause obesity

[Common Joe]

I'll take a triple bacon and cheese burger with super sized fries annnnnnnd... a diet coke.

Not a 1:1 ratio

[Tony Isaac]

Virtualization makes it easier to stand up a new "server." True.
This simplicity will lead to using more "servers." Granted.
But those virtual servers require far less hardware than the old physical servers. Many of these virtual servers are used only a small percentage of the time. Depending on the load, 10, 20, or even more servers can run on one physical piece of hardware.

So even if we use, say, five times more "servers" with virtualization, we will be using fewer physical units--fewer "resources."

In short, the math is not so simple.

Re:Not a 1:1 ratio

[hawguy]

Virtualization makes it easier to stand up a new "server." True.
This simplicity will lead to using more "servers." Granted.
But those virtual servers require far less hardware than the old physical servers. Many of these virtual servers are used only a small percentage of the time. Depending on the load, 10, 20, or even more servers can run on one physical piece of hardware.

So even if we use, say, five times more "servers" with virtualization, we will be using fewer physical units--fewer "resources."

In short, the math is not so simple.

Even if the resource cost to stand up and run a new server (with automation to patch and maintain the operating system) is zero, there's still a support cost in maintaining the application. Someone still has to patch (and test) the application to keep it up to date. Someone has to test the application after operating system patches to make sure nothing broke. Someone has to set up automated monitoring of an application that may not have been designed for any automated monitoring. Someone has to track down bugs and work with the vendor to get them fixed. Someone has to figure how to get data out of the application and into the company ERP system. Someone needs to maintain the password database on the application because no one in the department thought that bought it thought that "AD/LDAP integration" was important. When the department that bought it decides that they no longer want it, someone has to figure out how to migrate the data to their new latest and greatest application.

So even if IT can run 10 times more servers without additional hardware/support costs for the servers and operating system, someone in the organization needs to support the application, and that's not something that individual departments typically do well when they buy and run their own applications.

You shouldn't be surprised by Jevons Paradox

[NotSoHeavyD3]

Since engineers have always worked on efficiency so pretty much everything you use these days is more efficient that the equivalent item from 30 years ago. However people in the US use more energy per capita than they did 30 years ago.(So for example instead of 4 people in a family watching the same 25" TV during prime time each one of them has their own and or they watch it more. End result is the amount of energy used to watch TV is greater even though the actual TV uses less power.)

Re:You shouldn't be surprised by Jevons Paradox

[xvan]

That's not true.
30 years ago, you had no LCD/plasma tv's.
So with a ratio of 3:1 tv's, you're saving power.

With a 4:1 you'd spend a little more power on prime-time, but if there was an "always on" tv on the house, you'd be still saving power.

Re:You shouldn't be surprised by Jevons Paradox

[theshowmecanuck]

No. I think most code is generally nowhere near as efficient as 30 years ago. 30 years ago you were severely limited in processing speed, memory, and storage. To run a major enterprise business system, you needed to code thins as efficiently as possible. As computer systems became more advanced, businesses had coders write stuff faster, with less efficiencies in the code, but overall more cheaply because they didn't have to such experts to create highly optimized code. It didn't need to be as highly optimized since the faster speeds of the computers made up for less optimized code, as well as all the new GUIs etc. Ever notice that games take as long or longer to load now than before, even though computer systems are orders of magnitude more powerful now? Cool bloated frameworks and programmers who think they the greatest since they read about the latest asynchronous web framework on the internet screw that whole notion up. I'm tired tonight and in a shite mood... could have worded this better, but you get my drift. Goodnight.

Jevon's Paradox

[Okian Warrior]

Jevon's paradox is valid, but only under specific economic assumptions.

It's only true so long as there is more demand for the resource, and it's only a problem when the resource has a cost attached. Essentially, it's true in a "scarcity" economy, but not true under "post scarcity".

We've achieved "post scarcity" for several resources already; for example, phone calls and computer time.

Phone calls used to be expensive and billed by the minute, but nowadays it's virtually free. Similarly, computer time used to be metered and charged - in college, the CPU time for each program run was deducted from your account. Nowadays people can have as much un-metered computer time as they want.

CPU time and phone service aren't literally free, but the cost is so small as to be negligible.

Despite this, we do not see infinite consumption. People have a certain level of need for a resource, and when that need is met they stop consuming more. Coupled with a declining population, there is no reason to expect infinite consumption.

Your company may be using more resources than it needs... but so what? Computer resources are remarkably cheap - so cheap, in fact, that it may be more effective to ignore the problem. Optimize the biggest expenses first: if that turns out to be IT resources, then take a closer look. Otherwise, just ignore it.

(For another example of post-scarcity, consider the Chinese "dollar stores" that have cropped up. The cost of goods is so small that the time and expense of price tags makes a big difference. This is almost post-scarcity of tangible goods.)

Re:Jevon's Paradox

[Anonymous Coward]

CPU time and phone service aren't literally free, but the cost is so small as to be negligible.

Despite this, we do not see infinite consumption.

CPU time and electronic communication (and data storage) are excellent examples of Jevon's paradox. The cost has become negligible, and in response consumption has increased to the point where almost all use of these resources is either completely pointless, or of benefit to society so marginal that is is difficult to measure.

It's almost too easy to start citing examples:
- High frequency trading - astronomical use of low-latency coms and CPU power to perform arbitrages whose payoff rapidly converges to the cost of the technology and capital used.
- 'Big data' - incredible technological and intellectual resources devoted to things like predicting what NetFlix people should have recommended to them, so that books and TV programmes can be sold slightly more efficiently and marginally more profitably.
- Social media - massive numbers of servers chugging away in Oregon, for a user experience which is only slightly more engaging than swapping chat or gossip by voice phone, SMS or face-to-face (and roughly 50c per month per user of ad revenue). Many of these servers exist only because of attempts by one company to compete with another in a market for nearly identical services.
- Large numbers of TV channels, mostly devoted to repeats, other forms of redundancy, pointless services like 'SMS chatrooms on TV', gambling games and low-budget attempts to sell completely worthless products to socially marginalized and/or mentally ill viewers.
- various forms of state and corporate surveillance by electronic means, which are largely ineffectual and serve only to force those people who have something to hide to make a minimal effort to circumvent them.
- handheld games on smartphones of similar complexity and user experience to those available in the 1980's, requiring many orders of magnitude more sophisticated hardware, which is used for a) eye candy b) system and platform overhead caused by bad design and programming c) various forms of encryption, authentication and DRM, in order to ensure that no-one harms innovation and creativity by 'stealing' a copy of Puzzle Bobble.

For Chris'sakes, people are walking around with extraordinarily powerful handheld computers, which serve one purpose and one purpose only - simulating the behavior of a printed book, with absolutely no advantage except weight and space IF AND ONLY IF you are going to read two or more books on the same journey to work and back (and this effect is pretty negligible until you are replacing three or four paperbacks).

The old parable.

[Chas]

Work expands to fill the space given to it.
Give it no definable boundaries?

SpaceMonster: OOOOOOOH!!! *Wiggles fingers acquisitively*

Re:Shitty datacenters & Shitty management

[syockit]

But everyone else is adopting agile, so if we choose to have longer architecture phase, we will fail to adapt to the evolving market, and lose out.

I suppose it's a tragedy of commons, with time-to-market as the abused resource.