Re:Ransomware Forces Two Chemical Companies to Order ‘Hundre...
by mistrial9 on Sunday March 24, 2019 @10:20AM
(#19476461)
Anecdote: In the 90s California, there was a chemical science research company, perhaps formed in the late 70s. Many scientists there had PhDs or quality Master in Chemistry, and they set out to write software to support the drug discovery, pesticide and industrial chemicals industry. The company was well-managed, and it grew. Into the 90s, the Macintosh computer got a lot of attention for graphics, while Windows was stuck at 3.x, and many of the scientists had DEC associations.
So the company had a plural, cross-platform code base in C for some of its core IP. Scientists may not write the best code, but they can write a lot of it, so the core libraries grew and grew.
In the 1997 or so time, Internet grows, VAX declines, Windows improves and pushes hard. The senior management are being tempted by the huge (at the time) money for valuation. Someone decides to take the Microsoft point of view.
There was a "global rollout" effort conceived and implemented, to switch every working piece of code to Windows , backed by fanfare and the sort of content-less cheerleading you find at an ordinary school.. matching t-shirts and good looking people there to "help" you with the transition (!) to port the code ! There was tons of it, there were build chains, there was network code. But it was the MONEY at the top, and the relentless pressure from Microsoft and affiliates, directly, at golf courses and at hotels and at the airport and in the money meetings, that greased the wheels to decide for everyone, that Windows was the standard, end of story.
Many working, carefully built products, were retired, and the team management was required to change over or else be retired also. The change happened. Within a few years (before 2000) the entire company was sold to Elsivier for three-digit millions.
postscript - a small few senior scientists did find Java when it was released, and led an effort to port certain things to Java. The web was a cacophony, and Java might have over-represented itself as far as a web-GUI and also backend. No news about the fate of that, but it was a minority effort, amongst a few who had discretionary budgets to allocate for that.
So the company had a plural, cross-platform code base in C for some of its core IP. Scientists may not write the best code, but they can write a lot of it, so the core libraries grew and grew.
In the 1997 or so time, Internet grows, VAX declines, Windows improves and pushes hard. The senior management are being tempted by the huge (at the time) money for valuation. Someone decides to take the Microsoft point of view.
There was a "global rollout" effort conceived and implemented, to switch every working piece of code to Windows , backed by fanfare and the sort of content-less cheerleading you find at an ordinary school.. matching t-shirts and good looking people there to "help" you with the transition (!) to port the code ! There was tons of it, there were build chains, there was network code. But it was the MONEY at the top, and the relentless pressure from Microsoft and affiliates, directly, at golf courses and at hotels and at the airport and in the money meetings, that greased the wheels to decide for everyone, that Windows was the standard, end of story.
Many working, carefully built products, were retired, and the team management was required to change over or else be retired also. The change happened. Within a few years (before 2000) the entire company was sold to Elsivier for three-digit millions.
postscript - a small few senior scientists did find Java when it was released, and led an effort to port certain things to Java. The web was a cacophony, and Java might have over-represented itself as far as a web-GUI and also backend. No news about the fate of that, but it was a minority effort, amongst a few who had discretionary budgets to allocate for that.