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VMware's in court again. Customer relationships rarely go this wrong

(www.theregister.com)
245 points rntn | 1 comments | 08 Sep 25 12:00 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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alexvitkov ◴[08 Sep 25 13:11 UTC] No.45167821[source]▶
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

If you need 40,000 servers to keep your business running (which you don't, your ~3-8 million weekly transactions can be processed on 1 computer, but whatever), hire people that will work on you, and whose paycheck depends on keeping those computers working, to keep those computers working.

Game theory arguments like "they wouldn't screw me over because other people won't want to do business with them" don't work when the other party is trying to maximize quarterly earnings, and their long-term thinking is in the order of ~2 years.

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1. ajcp ◴[08 Sep 25 18:35 UTC] No.45172047[source]▶
You are severely underappreciating how complex a retail organization of Tesco's size is.

I work in this space for a retailer almost the same size as Tesco and when factoring in all the attendant organizations, businesses, and functions it requires, 40k servers does not surprise me at all.

Outside of just the brick-and-mortar stores you have Marketing, Retail, eComm, Merchandising, Strategic Sourcing, FP&A, Finance & Accounting, Asset Protection, Corporate Real Estate, Retail Real Estate, Internal Audit, Supply Chain, Transportation, Business Services, Data Science, etc etc. and IT at every level of those. Each one of these components is large enough to be a medium-to-large sized company in its own right.