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Michigan Sues HP Over Decade Long, $49 Million Incomplete Project
itwbennett writes: On Friday, embattled HP was hit with a new lawsuit filed by the state of Michigan over a 10-year-old, $49 million project that called for HP to replace a legacy mainframe-based system built in the 1960s. Through the suit filed in Kent County Circuit Court, the state seeks $11 million in damages along with attorney's fees and the funds needed to rebid and re-procure the contract.
I'm sure that the salesmen have long-since cashed any bonuses they received from landing the contract and moved on to other companies.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Just another in the long line of abject failures that define Carly Fiorina's career.
I'm writing in "Fucking NOBODY" for President. I suggest you all do the same. Shut it the fuck down.
At 50 million bucks, why didn't they emulate the old machinery or port the code to an interpreter running on a modern system? Off the top of my head, that sounds like the most reliable ways to duplicate exactly an old system.
That's a great question, and the answer is, IBM Z-series business unit has, bar none, the most aggressive, talented and ruthless customer retention team in the world. You're right, there's no sane reason why a mainframe application can't be emulated at least for a stopgap measure. But you'll find that there are a score of legal, political and business reasons why you won't be allowed to do that.
Moreover, you'll find that it's just impractical to port the application to any other reasonable platform. Even though your smartphone probably has more guts than the '60's era mainframe you're trying to get off of, actually making the cutover is very VERY difficult, for a variety of reasons, few of them technical.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Jobs of political power should never be held by those who seek them. Let them be filled through random draws, with voting taking place after the appointment to see whether they stay in office.
A user may have been instructed to do a process a certain way, but no one is sure what the reasoning is for doing it. It may be a valid reason; but that reason was discovered years ago by someone (either retired or dead), forgotten, and has just been done for traditions sake. In cases like this, it's hard to make a case to carry a process like that over to the new system, but it can't just be ignored either.
This, a thousand times. Nothing like finding two pieces of completely inexplicable code and cleaning them up. One speeds up processing by 2%, and you're the hero. The other turns out to have most of code flow of Western civilization running through it, and now you've just brought on the Long Night.