[2212] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Low end users
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steve Simmons)
Fri Jan 31 08:24:48 1992
From: scs@lokkur.dexter.mi.us (Steve Simmons)
To: com-priv@psi.com (Com-Priv Mailing List)
Date: Fri, 31 Jan 92 7:32:31 EST
Please don't take this personally Marc, but I think your objections
wound up proving my point . . .
Marc Horowitz <hela!Athena.MIT.EDU!marc> writes:
>This may be true in many cases, but it is not a universal law. At
>MIT, we have over 1000 workstations on campus. Almost 400 are in
>public areas. Even if you want to call the private ws owners de-facto
>maintainers, the public machines clearly have no such distinguised
>individual, and many of the private machines are in the same
>configuration as the public ones. With no customizations, no
>maintenance is necessary. All 1000 of these machines (and their
>servers) are maintained by a group of about 10 people, with 24x7 pager
>service. The network is run by about five people, if you want to
>count them, but they have other tasks as well, and the
>one-person-per-machine model ignores the net, anyway.
Ignoring the net is ignoring part of the cost of support. Forbidding
customization does cut support costs, but is exactly what centralized
computing systems do to cut support costs. Customization and hetero-
geneity are touted as virtues of distributed computing. MIT has
correctly determined that they increase support costs, and chose to
give up that benefit for the sake of lower costs. Don't get me wrong,
I agree with MIT.
And if memory serves, doesn't MIT run large chunks of the project
athena stuff? Did the development cost of that get factored into
support.
>(My example also excludes consultants and developers, but that still
>only accounts for another 50 people, plus part-time student
>consultants.)
It's easy to support the "easy" 95% of users. It's the 5% that needs
(demands) customization, that needs special machines, etc, that increases
the costs.
