Hardware and system support

Microsoft's "Geek Blogger", Robert Scoble, writes in his blog that "My comments are down. I have to switch to a new server, but don't have time this weekend since..."  Here in the 21st Century, why should any of us have to be concerned with or even inconvenienced by hardware and system management issues?  Have we learned nothing about building computer systems and applications over the past 50 years?  Apparently, we've learned very little.

 

Hardware is supposed to be so cheap that it's effectively free, but we fail to exploit those economics for system designs.

 

If even Microsoft's premiere blogger can't get decent system support, what do the rest of us get?  I've written about problems I've had with Blogger, but Blogger's service has been fairly decent for the past couple of days.  That's the point:  we should be able to characterize system support as absolutely not an issue rather than counting our blessings when we can go a few days without problems.

 

Deep sigh.

 

-- Jack Krupansky