Brendan wrote:
The chance of a company buying TVs and not monitors is zero. The chance of a company buying all of the TVs at the same time (and not buying some one year, more the next year, etc; and ending up with many different monitors) is very small. The chance that a sane company would buy many cheap trash TVs without testing one first and realising it's puss before buying the rest is also very small. The chance that a company would then not return them when they realise they suck on every OS is also tiny. The chance that a company would continue using cheap trash for 10 freaking years without replacing any of them is completely absurd.
I really, really wish that this were true, but it is not. Not even close. I have worked in companies that did exactly this, and worse, and there was no sign of them failing as businesses.
You have to understand that business decisions are
not based on reason, but on the personality of the decision maker. People can talk themselves into nearly any kind of nonsense, and the personality types who are likely to be running a business are exactly the sort who will doggedly hold on to nonsensical beliefs no matter how out of touch with reality they are.
In evolutionary biology, there is a concept called 'genetic drift': since the majority if genes are either inactive or have a lot of 'play' in the structure of the proteins they encode for, minor mutations which have little or no impact on the biological processes can accumulate and propagate over time. While they may make the processes slightly less efficient, they still will get carried along from generation to generation so long as they don't reduce the relative reproductive success of the individuals carrying them.
Most business decisions are like these genes: they aren't perfect, but they don't really impact the bottom line, at least not enough to affect how competitive the business is. IT purchasing and usage policy decisions are almost always in this category, meaning that they are more likely to be influenced by the whims of the decision makers than by the actual added value of the decisions. The practical upshot of this is that a lot of stupid decisions of exactly this sort never get corrected, until their effect actually hurts the business's success.
I mentioned
The Daily WTF and
Not Always Working earlier. Humor value aside, these sites serve as a wake-up call for anyone who thinks that free market interactions (to the extent that they actually occur in the real world at all) are absolutely self-correcting. While they
are to a certain degree, that mechanism is neither infallible nor rapid, and the self-correction is often - even usually - overwhelmed by out-of-market influences (political, social, psychological, meteorological, geographical, etc.) that are more powerful than the rather delicate market forces. Consider: most of the ludicrous coding and design mistakes highlighted on The Daily WTF did
not cause a disastrous failure, and many worked 'well enough' that they passed through code reviews and were put into production, and only got noticed when either some edge case arose that broke them, or when someone happened to find them while making unrelated code changes. Furthermore, many of these bugs go uncorrected even after being found, for reasons unrelated to good design which were deemed more important. Now consider that for every one of these bugs, there are probably a dozen, or maybe a hundred, in the same codebase that never get noticed at all.
