[H-GEN] London Stock Exchange.

Benjamin Fowler somelamer567 at gmail.com
Wed Sep 10 08:41:22 EDT 2008


>
> Another trophy for Microsoft.
>
> The London Stock Exchange, the worlds third largest stock exchange, down
> for
> a day.
> A little after a year of adopting Microsoft Windows and a Dot Net system,
> the London Stock Exchange was stopped dead for a whole day.
>
> Congratulations and well done Microsoft.
>
> I wonder who got the bonus for that job and the cost of the downtime. It's
> probably too late to revise the Service Level Agreements.


This is really funny, especially if you've seen the obnoxious ads that
Microsoft have carpet-bombed the newspapers and the Square Mile with.

I love the Slashdot quote:

Colin Smith writes 'TradElect, the Microsoft.Net based trading platform for
the London Stock Exchange was offline for about seven hours, meaning
that *their
5-nines SLAs are shot for approximately the next 100 years* [my emphasis].


This is a BIG deal for the LSE, who several years ago moved from an 'open
outcry' trading system to a purely electronic system.  Unfortunately for the
LSE, the barriers to entry for other competitors is not that high these
days, so in addition to having to work a *lot* harder to stay in business
these days, they're at the tender mercies of their technology vendors,
including Microsoft, who have the power (through their competence, or lack
thereof) to put them out of business completely.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-10036286-62.html

Tsk! Tsk!

There's a *very* good reason why people pay the likes of my employers
(Reuters) big money for reliable trading and market data platforms.
Producing and maintaining that kind of reliability costs money, and going
Microsoft just because it's cheap, or because it runs on your 12 year old
son's home computer, is disingenous at best.

Ben.
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