I come from a background of UNIX; from SunOS, Irix, Solaris, Linux and MacOS. And yes, MacOS is a UNIX for those that have never opened a terminal... Shame on you;-). Actually well done Steve, you took NextStep and brought it to the masses. Kudos.
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| My old favourite UNIX workstation |
I used to love my hardware, particularly the purple Sun Sparc boxes, and the more colourful SGI indigo ones - loved those Indys BTW. But these days I'm not so bothered; even my much loved Macintosh doesn't really do anything for me, though part of that is probably down to me no longer rooting for an underdog: I love supporting the little guy, and love even more an obscure brand. Apple is just too big for me now, but I wish them well.
So why is this? Well the hardware is so commoditised these days that the intelligence is all in the software wrapped around it; it's this that gets me excited: auto provisioning for integration testing, nice! Burst capacity into the Cloud, smart! Deploying an app onto any portable device, wicked! This is the stuff we, as a business enablers, should be focused on. Not the colour and brand of the physical tin it all runs on.
I had an interesting dialogue with a colleague the other day about the pros of a multi vendor x86 strategy: leverage etc, but I still see the silos run deep, and the badge allegiance high. White label the lot, drive down the price, and focus on managing the service back to the business. This is where the role of the architect comes in to sell the vision and get stakeholder buy in.
It's all about business differentiation. Our focus should be on the areas within IT that can give our business partners an edge; managing commodity hardware platforms just don't provide that.
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