My Friday thinking...

My Friday thinking..... the 80/20 rule.

Today during driving my 2 week old new car, a plug-in hybrid, i was thinking about what I was using out of the 100 % of my car IT infrastructure.

Out came, not much, i can choose between Eco,Normal,Sport or my own driving style. But does I need all this to drive from A to B ?

I remembered the 80/20 rule or Pareto principle. Yes reflects a bit the use of my car's possibilities. I thought, that I was not able to choose, what i wanted as goodies to use for me, i had to take all.

Today we see that a lot of companies in this time of pandemic, give to their employees on certain matters the choice to choose, stay at home or return to the office. Have more contacts with your family as before, choose your working hours and i forget surely a lot of other choices.

But as with my car, is my or your company give you the choice of choosing with what type of PC or Software you want to work ?

The choice between Open Source or Closed Licensed Software. From the Operating System to the daily programs you and I are using. 

And again the 80/20 rule came into my mind, we are all using only 20 % of the capabilities of our daily working equipment at disposal, from our mobile to our desktop.

And the point i was coming was, why should I pay for the 80 % I am not using. Can I not only pay for the features I am using... seems complicated.

Living in a small country in Europe, and this Europe want's to get out also of this pressure to pay for things that we are not using, is pushing towards open systems, using Open Source and even trying hard to push for RISC-V processor developments.

This openess should also drive our CEO's and CIO's, giving us back the possibility to choose which type of hardware and software we want to use, Open Source or Closed Environments.

And this could also be done on the server side, pushing more openess there, of course in a controlled and overlooked manner :-)

I like to run my VM's under KVM, i like to run my e-mail with open mail servers, yes I could enumerate other domains inside this Open minded thinking.

And I like this European idea to have their own Clouds and HPC centers based on openess.

Yes and yes, let's rethink our way of the choose factor in IT, let's sit together as buddies and discuss, brainstorm or how you want to call it, find the best way for all instead of forcing things to use.

Okay, let's finish now my Friday thinking, it's only a thought moving through my brain...

Marcel

Human being and CTO.