[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Foundation 2008-2009 Annual Plan

Thu Jul 3 00:57:58 UTC 2008

On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 8:36 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> I spent a number of years directly in charge of spending a technology
> budget of size comparable to Wikimedia's.
>
[...]
> If we assume that moore's law applies directly to price/performance
> (which isn't a totally outrageous assumption in many cases)  money
> differed on technology spending has an annualized return of 60%!
> Thats astonishingly good: almost as good as printing money.
>
Sure, for new hardware purchases.  But, when you were in charge of a
tech budget, what percentage of that budget was spent on hardware?
Servers tend to be cheap compared to people.

I guess that differs from company to company, but in the case of the
WMF, Sue has suggested that a significant amount of new hardware is
going to be donated by a third party.

I can't agree with Sue that not spending money until it's "needed" is
a good thing, unless by "needed" she means more like "useful".  But
then, that must be what she means, because she agrees that finally
hiring another dev is a "good thing".