Any techies who have worked at more then one place, can tell you what they inherit from their predecessor sometimes confuses the heck out of them. This really came home to me this week during a conversation with Mike Sessler who, for the record, REALLY knows his stuff. He was relating an experience he had inheriting gear that was similar to my own. In my own experience we have some gear that I inherited that I REALLY hate.  One of the differences in the story was I do understand WHY it was chosen and THAT makes a world of difference.  While I would not have picked it given the chance I have a hard time arguing the logic behind the initial choice.  The other thing to note is that gear was picked out 6 years ago. In tech years that not decades old, it is almost centuries old.  Technology has changed so much in the past 6 years that challenges we had 6 years ago have simple solutions now.  What it boils down to is the culmination of time and bad planning had taken their toll.

On the upside Mike has a plan, it isn’t a quick fix, but he has made some decisions and is working toward those goals. I wish I could say the same, but honesty what I have inherited works, and until it doesn’t we will most likely continue to use it. This story is not unique and that is the scary part.

The buzz word for fixing this is “future proofing”.  Using myself as an example again, one of the things our gear did well was furture proof us for the SD to HD transition.   Thus allowing us to make the swap from SD to HD piece by piece over the course of 2-3 year and in that time continue to utilize ALL of our older SD and new HD assets at the same time. I can now look at it from our current position and say NOW that we have transitioned over to all HD assets, this gear is now no longer and asset, it is actually a detriment. That said if someone were to inherit this from me tomorrow they would come in an think I was crazy for picking this gear.