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A comment on Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check. Parent comment

Re:Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check by staofbur on Friday July 14, 2017 @04:31AM (#14768400)
Back in about 1999, I was working for a big corporate and one of our Oracle admins lost her shit and had a meltdown, think it was around 8i era. She just got up and walked out shouting "fuck this fucking shit, I quit". This was on a freshly delivered HP N-Class HPUX box and they just couldn't get it to run after a month of going back and forth between HP and Oracle.

I bumped into her last year at Ansible Fest London and she was still angry about it 17 years later!

And that's what Oracle does to your soul :)

Edit: that N class and Oracle NEVER got deployed in the end. It just sat there unused, licenses weren't renewed, it got sheepishly powered down after a few months to save electricity and it got chucked in a skip after 5 years. About £200k of expenditure down the pan.

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Re:Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check by reitanqild on Friday July 14, 2017 @05:22AM (#14768580)
licenses weren't renewed, it got sheepishly powered down after a few months to save electricity [...] About £200k of expenditure down the pan.

I guess you could easily lost even more money. Good thing they stopped it at £200k.

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Re:Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check by staofbur on Friday July 14, 2017 @06:12AM (#14768721)
Yeah a big chunk of that was consultancy, support, Oracle licenses. TCO was going to be around £500k for 5 years.

The whole platform got replaced with SQL Server on a clone PC server in the end which cost less than £10k. No fan of Microsoft but there was no competition. And the tooling was far better!

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Re:Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check by odammit on Friday July 14, 2017 @11:43AM (#14770657)
When I get issues were vendors point fingers at each other I three way call them, tell them what's up, hit mute, go get a coffee, and let them figure it out.
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Re:Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check by staofbur on Friday July 14, 2017 @02:57PM (#14772294)
We did that. They were still finger pointing two hours later.

Legal guys said it wasn't worth suing them because we'd have to pay up then or lose the support contract.

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Re:Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check by odammit on Saturday July 15, 2017 @12:46PM (#14777552)
Oof. You should bill them for your time. I sent HP or Dell (can't recall) an invoice for $800 in my early 20s for my time wasted on a support call where a "support tech" had asked me to reinstall Windows as a way to fix a disk that failed in a RAID array. OS was AIX.
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