Platform
Wars
vIn
1985, MIS folks looked at PCs seriously for the first time — and they
didn’t like what the saw.
²To the MIS folks who were building mission
critical apps, PCs were
irrelevant. PCs lacked sophisticated time-sharing and transaction oriented operating systems, had
no industrial strength
databases, no batch-scheduling facilities, no CASE tools, no modern programming languages. AND,
the little applications being built
had none of the fail-safe mechanisms or
design methodologies that MIS folks now knew were critical to creating bullet-proof
applications.
vThus
arose the cultural split we all live with today.
²A new breed came out of the ‘80s: yesterday
teenage hackers and dBase and
1-2-3 programmers have become today’s
client/server gurus. Yesterday’s computer club president is today’s network administrator.
AND, the two sides still
don’t talk to each other, the PC professionals and large system professionals still don’t talk
to each other — they have
different value systems, different technical backgrounds, and different beliefs.