> Whats interesting is that not only do the distributors want to avoid > fragmentation (your maintenance cost rises steeply with each shift you make > away from the base tree) but the customers understand the importance.
> The enterprise customers are quite open that anyone who goes off on a weird > tangent won't get their business. I don't think it's so much maintenance costs as people skills and cross-training requirements - a related but still distinct issue. Irving Wladawsky-Berger's main pitch to IBM's management centred on the future availability of skills - skill shortages are something no vendor can fix quickly. The whole point fo IBM is that all of their implementations can access a common skills pool in the market. Perhaps Meta are mentally rerunning what happened to UNIX. -- Phil Payne http://www.isham-research.com +44 7785 302 803 +49 173 6242039
