seasoned_geek
I'm not a hardware buy, but I believe this is a carry over from the VAX days long before there was SUN.
The "services" people subscribe to when setting up some kind of shopping cart on their Web site are neither complex nor highly customizable. Most importantly, they offer no opportunity what-so-ever to purchase a guaranteed delivery + guaranteed execution service.
When an order from a dealer (doesn't matter what automotive area) leaves their Business System, it is no longer their responsibility. It is the responsibility of the badge (Freightliner, Harley, Toyota, etc.) That order, which can be hundreds of thousands of dollars each and every day, must completely pass through the badge system, routing out to warehouses, vendors, distributors and manufacturing schedules, without ever being lost no matter what fails.
This is a completely different business model than Criminal-Net sales where people complain about the billions of dollars worth of "abandoned shopping carts" each year. By and large these are not "abandoned shopping carts." These are the symptom of a poorly designed system built with feeble tools. Something FAILED and the consumer went to a different site to place their order.
Blade and rack mount servers are built with inferior hardware. Their entire premise is the swarm principle.
Many will die, but some will survive.
Each and every time one of the many die, the customer leaves. Some sites have tried to "fix" this problem by sending you emails every few hours for days about the things "you forgot in your cart." This isn't a fix. This is an alcoholic refusing to admit they have more than a drinking problem.
Despite _constant_ denial by a good many people who claim to be "in the know" OpenVMS is still heavily used by defense contractors and various Homeland Security/DOD groups. Once you purge _all_ OpenSource from it the OS really is rock solid and secure.
During the time around the Bejing (sp?) Olympics, the largest and most modern Chinese steel mill was being designed and scheduled to be built after the games. The came to America for a custom control system written in FORTRAN running on OpenVMS. I know because I architected it.
A certain very famous brewer of dark beer in Ireland supposedly uses it to make their tasty beverages.
Most steel and paper mills around the world run OpenVMS for process control. A large number of nuclear power plants as well.
Putting it bluntly. OpenVMS, with _all_ OpenSource removed, is the OS humans bet the species on each and every day.
If you want to read a novella which has a big section discussion what happens when OpenVMS suddenly doesn't exist you should read this:
It's the middle book of the "Earth That Was" trilogy.
Infinite Exposure Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars
Moving to a common back end, especially for BASIC, would be a truly wretched decision. It would also be the final nail in the coffin of the interactive BASIC environment which VAX had and the industry begged for on Alpha. When it to the Itanium (Itanic) hardware we were all too busy begging for a processor that wouldn't combust like Samsung Galaxy or one of those hoverboards.
The interactive BASIC environment wasn't just for students. It provided a great sandbox to test out algorithms quickly, much like today's script kiddies would call a modern IDE.
http://theminimumyouneedtoknow.com/app_book.html
VMS was the OS of choice when it posolutely absitively had to work. It was even banned from the Black Hat conferences because it never gave up the flag. THEN they started adding OpenSource components and it became just as insecure and unstable as Windows and Linux. It is now, once again welcomed at Black Hat conferences because every piece of OpenSource on it is the same 8-lane wide security breach the other platforms have.