This past weekend was General Conference for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which means I spent it watching broadcasts from Salt Lake City. In one of his talks, President Monson (the president of the church) referred to a passage in Alice in Wonderland that I think has some application to ITS:
“Cheshire Puss,” she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. “Come, it’s pleased so far,” thought Alice, and she went on: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
Whether we run applications on a mainframe or a Solaris box or a Windows laptop doesn’t make a lot of difference if we don’t know what we want them to accomplish.
If you don’t know (yet) what you want to accomplish in the future with your hardware, but you know you want to replace it now (for example is you’re running out of capacity), would it not be the case that some of these hardware choices would support a wider range of possible strategies than others?
Not claiming I know which hardware set that would be, just listing it as an example of how the very lack of a strategy could be a justification for favoring some hardware platforms over others.