In the 90’s I worked for a large retailer. Our centralized systems were on IBM mainframes, with some Unix servers for specialized work. We ran a small Unix server - really just a decent PC - in the stores. We had very low end machines running DOS-based terminal emulators for POS, etc.
Senior management wanted a some kind of communication platform for store employees. Something that could handle shared, broadcast comms to all employees, but also individualized comms to store managers, and ideally even questionnaire-like forms for surveys and the like. The entire system had to be secure and tightly controlled, e.g. employee A at store 1 shouldn’t be able to email employee B at store 2.
At some point we’d adopted using Lotus Notes at the HQ as platform de jour. (previously we were all in on PowerBuilder apps, remember that?).
It was no surprise, then, when IBM flew a one of our VPs to Cambridge (or maybe Boca Raton as part of another deal…) and he came back and announced we had purchased something like 50,000 seats for Lotus Notes and were implementing it as a store comm system.
A colleague and I were part of the architectural team. We didn’t have much of a formalized practice in those days, but we’d both been involved in the design and implementation of a lot of key store systems, and we weren’t idiots. We pointed out we’d never tested this sort of thing.
The Lotus team suggested installing Notes in a test store. We pointed out we had no compatible Windows equipment in the store. They suggested accessing Notes remotely. I can’t recall how. Unfortunately, our store networking system was Very Small Aperture Terminal satellite-based. High bandwidth, but also high latency, something like 3-4 seconds. Interactive apps over VSAT just didn’t cut it.
Now my memory of all details is a little fuzzy after 30 years, but as I recollect, Notes could effectively work offline, and then synchronize when back online. This was a cool feature for distributing apps and data. So, of course, the Lotus teams said the obvious, “Just purchase a separate server for Notes in the stores, and we can sync to that, and then all access will be local.”
Did I mention this was Retail?
Suffice it to say when we told Sr Mgmt the solution was going to require purchasing a dedicated server for every location (we were growing like crazy those days), the whole thing came to a screeching halt, and the 50K seat deal was cancelled. Someone lost a nice commission.
At the time I didn’t blame IBM. They were just acting on very incomplete information. Our VP, and old MF guy who now had responsibility for “Distributed Systems” as well, should have had an internal review before committing. I suspect he didn’t get any IBM Christmas cards that year.
Did we adopt standard email for comms? Oh, heck no. We rolled our own Frankenstein implementation of a backend and client, replete with our first C app on MVS. That’s a story for another day.
Notes stayed alive as our internal email, etc client for quite a while longer. I even got it running under Red Hat Linux, courtesy of Wine. Eventually the wheel turned, and we moved to something else. Was it better? No.
An absolute classic of "we've done no requirements analysis at all, but our exec went drinking with the wrong people and that now defines the solution, regardless of the problem".
In a former life about ten years ago I transitioned to managing a long-established, mature development team. Some of the developers had a couple of monitors. I think the largest was maybe a 19" model. Our business users, who sat on the opposite side of the building, and who they visited frequently, sported 3 monitor setups, each 24", maybe even 27". The main point was that our business users had more and substantially better equipment than the dev team. The devs were not happy about this. I was not happy about this.
Thankfully I had a reasonable boss. Apparently the argument, "we can't design UIs, we can recreate how our users actually use our product" hadn't been tried before or at least hadn't been successful. Suffice it to say I put in an order that recreated the UX of our business users.
I shared this news with my peer managers in the department. They followed my tack, and soon enough at least 3 other teams were rocking decent equipment.
Then the VP got wind of it, and said, "No more orders for new equipment until the existing equipment is EOL", or something like that. You know, okay, I get it, we're talking a lot of monitors. But, dammit, people were just a little happier, or maybe just not as pissed off at one thing we could control.
I didn't even try to expense the 43" 4K TV I used for a monitor at home.
Every time I’ve worked at a company where teams started picking their own hardware and expensing it, it ended like this. It usually started with reasonable orders, but once some teams notice that expensing hardware is working they try to push the limits of what they can get away with.
Ended up with weird situations like software and accounting people rocking those ultra expensive Apple cinema displays while sitting in their new Aeron chairs at their motorized standing desks which were always in the sitting down position.
Then someone gets shocked by the office expense line item at quarterly review time and cuts it off for everyone to try to balance out those expenditures for the rest of the year.
So we’d have a few people in the office with tricked out workstations and high end gear and then everyone else was on the same generic monitor and chair that was decided for the whole company long ago.
Even the most generous company I worked for that made a point of supporting engineer’s workstations eventually had to cut it off and standardize because the purchases were getting unjustifiable. There was also a lot of stuff like nice monitors or computer upgrades “disappearing” where you couldn’t really pin blame on anyone, because it was actually common for people to swap hardware around.
The only sustainable solution I’ve seen is when engineering gets together and argues for a reasonable set of computer gear and also a phased upgrade plan that doesn’t involve one giant expenditure in a single quarter.
Yeah we had the same thing. We had one person choose a massive curved ultra wide screen and then decide they didn’t like it so it sat in the hall beside their office for 6 months.
> the only sustainable solution I’ve seen is when engineering gets together and argues for a reasonable set of computer gear and also a phased upgrade plan
Design by committee doesn’t work IMO, and the phased upgrade plan works until bob decides that Fred got a new PC and wants the new GPU or feels stung by the fact that he got an older model by virtue of being upgraded 6 months earlier.
The only way I’ve seen it work is when engineering accept that they don’t need the absolute latest and greatest, and the directors plus agreeing on rolling stock upgrades. On my last team, I had someone argue with me that they needed a GPU upgrade from previous gen flagship to current gen flagship, when our game didn’t even require the tier below their current card to develop. They had the newest workstation of any team member at the time.
I think that providing modern monitors that make sense is probably the easiest way to please employees. No matter how excellent the salary is, if they are stuck working on old, small, blurry, faded screens, they'll be unhappy. It also gives a bad impression of the company as a whole. I did L1 tech support a long time ago, and people were overwhelmingly happy to see me coming to replace their old CRTs with LCDs.
