Comment by larrys | Hacker News Reader

Comment by larrys | Hacker News Reader

"Now, Facebook has provided a new option for these big name Wall Street outfits. But Krey also says that even among traditional companies who can probably benefit from this new breed of hardware, the project isn’t always met with open arms. “These guys have done things the same way for a long time,” he tells Wired."

Maybe one reason is because they've been around long enough to know what happens with bleeding edge technology.

And as the (old) saying went, "nobody ever got fired by going with IBM".

But the truth is the reliability and "shit hits the fan" if a Wall Street system goes down (and financial loss) is much greater in a traditional business system then if the same thing happens for a free service like facebook. Or somebodies "Show HN what I built this weekend" app.

So of course they are going to move slower. And they should. They have more to lose.

If Facebook transitions to its new hardware and the hardware begins to crash and burn and users start getting affected, so will Facebook... there are competitors who would love to have Facebook's lunch. So reliability is pretty up-there for Facebook too.

If Facebook is down for 2 hours, you're not suddenly going to sign up on MySpace. By contrast, other companies can lose millions of dollars in that same timespan!

Major stock exchanges have gone down for hours, I've had trouble reaching my bank's web site for hours. Let this myth of the enterprise having any idea of what its doing die.

And Facebook could lose millions of dollars in that time span, depending on what time of the day the downtime occurs. They make money from advertising, down-time means no clicking and no eyeballs.

Facebook regularly pisses off large swathes of its users and they stay anyways. You can look at basically any feature they launch and subsequently have users trying to revolt over or the numerous privacy scandals.

I was at a conference last year where the SVP of Network Services for NYSE/Euronext (Andrew Bach) was talking about their growing data and bandwidth needs, and they are pushing the envelope. They need something very reliable obviously, but they're not sitting on their hands. Instead they're constantly pushing their vendors for less latency, more bandwidth and faster storage.

and inertia. It's thinking like this that causes the smaller companies to outpace, outgrow, and eventually eclipse larger companies.

At the same time, Facebook seems to do a pretty good job of building reliable systems.

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