I was talking to an old colleague about what he sees going on in the industry and what some customers are asking. His answer was that a lot of people just want good enough systems, they do not request the best suited systems or what gives them any competitive advantage. Pretty sad as the IT industry always strived and tried to be innovative and make the best reliable and scaleable systems. Have we forgotten about this, is mediocracy the mantra of the day. Good enough systems are not only sad, but they cost companies and society time and money, you can always get more money, but once time is lost you cannot get it back.

Today I read that a countries online tax system crashed as it could not copy with the load at the end of year deadline for tax returns. So everyone has to spend their time doing their tax return again, to what cost to society and the economy. Was this calculated when good enough systems were specified. I hope this was not a good enough system, but some other problem. We do not need expensive technologies to fix this. The multicore CMT systems like the T5220 Niagara multi-core processors as a web tier and scaleable M-series enterprise servers as backend database engines can be used to avoid these problems. They can replace and be used to consolidate masses of good enough systems, that are not really good enough as we just saw. T5220 and M-series are good enough for every day use and can scale quickly to cope with peaks. We have the tools to avoid these embarassing IT problems lets use better systems.

If we put good enough brakes on our cars will they stop us in time when the car is full. To me that is not good enough. I want safety the system that meets the everyday and highest emergency requirements placed on them.

Good enough is not sufficent. We have the ability to do better, otherwise we have a serious malaise in society. How many of us will send our kids to good enough schools, if we had the choice and means to do otherwise.

If you only have the time to find good enough systems, I will save you time to find better ones. Here is a link to some better systems:

Consolidate several good enough small systems into this and save money and power. http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t5120

Consolidate many medium good enough systems to this and get more performance and reliability. http://www.sun.com/servers/highend/m8000

Who wrote this; "Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognises genius."