I knew an IT “law” for a long time.
The law says: Any time when a big business IT system crashing news come out, some “experts” will always try to see if Windows is running at that business IT infrastructure.
If it is, no matter how that “crash” happened (human error, hardware issue or power failure without proper internal backup plans), “experts” will try as hard as possible to list million reasons that Windows can not run mission critical tasks and who runs it is a moron and deserves failure.
if it is not, then “experts” keep quiet.
This law started from MS going public 30 years ago and will last as long as MS staying relevant.
The law also has an interesting effect: 98% IT pros either hate M$ or love MS (half/half); 2% pros claim they are “neutral” although they actually don’t.
Alright, enough personal opinions. Let’s back to the news.
I knew United Airlines system down on Friday (pcworld news). The news didn’t mention what system it’s using and I’m curious about just that.
I did some little homework and find a year 2002 news titled United Airlines And IBM Create Powerful Customer Relationship Management System (from bizwiz.com news archive). So it’s very likely UA is still running IBM DB2 as their core system.
I’d rather believe the UA’s Friday IT system glitch is human error or hardware related, but again, people who loves religious fight will always bash big names if they have a chance.
Well, to make things even funnier, the original news (the pcworld news) did mention the UA’s sister company “Continental Airlines” is not affected by the glitch. I took a quick look at Coninental Airlines website, they are using ASP.NET and very likely their core system is just Windows based (I think this is a reasonable guess).
So I’m glad to say, so far, in this UA case, it’s very likely not a Windows issue, and I also gamble those “experts” will mostly keep quiet this time.