If your computer worked like agribusiness. . .

Software engineer-turned-small farmer Dave Haxton compares them:

If we applied the same principles to software engineering that modern agribusinesses apply to farming and ranching, we'd have five or six computers in the US, to which everybody would log in from dumb terminals. And when the system went down or had to be maintained, everybody would be off-line, and no work would get done. The computer industry has, over the years, decentralized. We realized that many computers could work far more effectively than one. Agriculture has gone the other direction: did you know that 90% of the meat distributed in the US comes from four packers?

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