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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: 0.001s | 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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amluto ◴[08 Sep 25 13:55 UTC] No.45168315[source]▶
To be fair, and I know nothing about Tesco’s actual stack, a large grocery chain needs to track their contracts with suppliers, track their inventory in each location and in transit, track what goods they want in which locations, understand which larger pallets and big boxes contain which goods, track things prepped in house, and also optimize what to move from where, to where, and when and how. The latter part probably uses some spiffy stack involving something like CPLEX or Gurobi, and it’s not running on their “1 computer” OLTP stack.

That being said, I don’t see what 40k servers is for unless the POS machines are thin clients that use a substantial fraction of a server each.

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regularfry ◴[08 Sep 25 14:12 UTC] No.45168540[source]▶
A long and storied history of nasty surprises has taught me to never underestimate the complexity of an unfamiliar domain.

In that sense I'm surprised it's only 40,000.

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1. Terr_ ◴[08 Sep 25 19:59 UTC] No.45173174{3}[source]▶
Yeah, I'm pessimistically sure that there is other stuff, like:

* Checking whether each item scanned has satisfied a logical contract for a discount, some of which may be per-region, per-store, or even per-customer.

* If multiple exclusive coupons or deals are available, resolve the contradiction, preferably in favor of the customer.

* Check if any items or quantities of items require an ID to be shown before proceeding, and record information about the employee authorizing it.

* Update customer "rewards" data and generate any special offers so that you can put it onto their receipt.

And that's not even starting to get into all the other less-customer-synchronous stuff that you still need CPU power somewhere to do. Managing stock levels, orders, deliveries, price changes, anti-"shrinkage", employee shifts, market-research, status and repairs of freezer-units, operational logging and telemetry, every form of reporting/dashboard "strategic insight" stuff beloved by upper management...