New Year’s Reflections
WHAT WERE WE THINKING?
Early Adopter Syndrome
Whenever clients ask us about the latest, greatest, newest computer hardware or software, we always tell them the same thing: “… under no circumstances should you ever, ever, ever be an early adopter!” Why? Because you pay a premium price for the new thing; the new thing has unworked-out bugs; there is little to no consumer feedback (user forums) on which to base a decision; the manufacturer is anxious to please the stockholders at all costs; and, as P.T. Barnum is quoted as saying, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” This report falls into the category of “Do as we say” not, “Do as we did!” In an effort to gain better control of, lower costs, and increase response time we decided to put in our own server this past year. Now those of you who know us know that we spent over 20 years working with P.C.’s and debugging Microsoft O.S. Finally, we moved over to the Mac. And it has been a match made in heaven – until the day we installed Lion Server. It had just been released this past summer, and based upon the performance records of the Leopard Server release, man, this baby was going to be the bee’s knees. It wasn’t long before the user forums started retching. So much of what made Leopard Server a champion turns out to be stripped from Lion. Somedays the server worked, but more often than not some portion failed. One day my $400.00 site certificates were working, the next, my client’s were getting this message: “this sites certificates have been revoked!” We were a pariah on the internet! For three months we worked with support trying out this fix & that. In the end we decided to return to our previous host server. We’d like to go to Leopard Server, but for now, this experience has left the taste of Microsoft in our mouth. I suppose this is our reminder to “Do what we say…”
