A few years ago, N korean hackers go into a bank (IBM in S Korea helped maintain/secure it) and wiped their primary database AND standby backup database. By the time they realized what was happening, even the backup site off useless.
Others have remarked that a digital production house like Sony routinely moves dozens of terabytes of video per hour over its network, and outbound to digital projection theaters.
Salesforce. It's not a bad system for what it was designed to do--sales and marketing. The problem is that it is over-promoted and over-sold as a versatile platform that can do anything. When you actually try to model complex business logic, however, you're screwed. Unless your business model conforms closely to their pre-built model, Salesforce development turns into an exercise of shoehorning your data into a system that just can't accommodate it.
If you need to model data with a lot of junction objects, good luck getting reports. You can only report on up to 4 objects at a time. Let's hope that you don't need any serious data aggregation since matrix reports limit you to 2x2 fields. You want to store data in JSON format and access it through a NoSQL database? You've got to build it outside of the system and have it talk to that database through custom code. But I thought Salesforce could do anything!
And on top of all of those obstacles, you get the privilege of paying a high monthly fee for a system that you'll probably only be able to get working if you shell out yet more license fees for 3rd party apps that hopefully fill in the gaps. But at least they just released a new analytics system that overcomes some of the absurd limitation on reporting that are inherent in the system--but of course it will cost you.
That being said, the alternatives better be good if I'm going to pay for them. Postgresql enterprise is probably worth it, given how awesome the free version is. And even then, I would just build a Django or Rails app on top of it, so even if I have to customize it, I won't be paying for the very fancy shackles that Salesforce gives me.
That's the biggest issue with their growth right now. Salesforce has done a great job in marketing that it can "do anything"... provided you can build it yourself and get around all the developer platform limitations. I used to do Salesforce consulting and custom development, won their hackathon in 2009, worked with many companies on internal tools and apps and am so happy to be out of that game now.
Who were your typical Salesforce consulting and custom development clients? I may be wrong, but I would think that if you have enough money to spend on customisation for an app that doesn't even belong to you, it may be cheaper and more efficient in the long run to commission a custom built solution.
Is there anything that actually comes close to doing this and doesn't fall into the problem of "...turns into an exercise of shoehorning your data into a system that just can't accommodate it."? Sadly, from what I have seen Salesforce is probably still the best solution beyond building your own apps.
Yeah, Salesforce might just be the best of these types of systems. But even then, it is the best-dressed clown at the circus. Unless you have a really simple business model, you should probably just build a custom app.
What business are you running, and how big is your current team? Just curious, as I've heard that Salesforce is probably overkill for most small businesses/startups.
"...Engineers make plenty of business decisions every day: Deciding the size of a database field, for instance, or a data type. Those types of choices impact the business, admittedly in a micro way..."
Micro? I have seen decisions about database architecture that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of hours of work over time.
Well, in Python, if you duplicate a return statement, then your code will recognize only the first statement. This, for example, will return 1:
def func():
return 1
return 2
If the code from the goto fail example was written in Python so as to return an object when a condition was met, and it ended up with 2 return statements, then Python would have just returned the first one in the proper scope and moved on. Of course, this still depends on implementation in the code itself.
There are other reasons why choice of language matters. If you need a simple web app, you're probably writing it in PHP or Ruby instead of C. But you'll likely use C if you're interfacing with hardware. A lot of apps that need high concurrency use Erlang. If you can write a quick Python script that solves a problem before you can even get Eclipse to load, then why would you even bother trying to write the solution in Java?
Language errors aside, it's pretty obvious that at least in some cases, the choice of programming language does matter.
