IMHO about import substitution

Reading about import substitution on Habr, I wanted to express my IMHO. I observed this process from the side of a state organization (unitary enterprise). Now I observe it from the side of a server administrator in a large PJSC with a lot of influence of the state.

Problems:

· Unfounded optimism. I saw this at 22. Like, we'll substitute imports… and sales tell tales that they have almost the same as foreign vendors, only better. In fact, it turns out

· Raw. If not to say wet. How many MS develop OS or VMware solutions for virtualization? There are thousands of people there. With the ability to attract the best developers from the globe. And a cash flow from clients from a significant part of solvent companies and countries. And in our country, in a couple of years, with the efforts of hundreds of other people, they will assemble something comparable? Seriously?

· They won't assemble. You look at a different solution. You look at the prices, which are much higher than the replacement. Are we really supposed to pay this? Or should we be paid extra as testers and partly as developers of technical specifications for software refinement. Here, point 1 is a bummer. The simplest task is to replace the office… I remember how they presented P7 Office to us. As fully compatible software with MSO. Moreover, the ambassador answered the question with this compatibility, “how is your new paid product better than the free and proven Libra/OO.” And you start asking a specific question – are Access functions fully supported? No. They don't need to support the format because they don't have a DBMS. What about VBA? “It's time to forget about BASIC, write in JavaScript, we don't have our own IDE – use a browser.” I didn't even ask about Power Query and M. Moreover, in large businesses, even with thousands of IT specialists, there is a huge number of shadow automations. On the same VBA in Excel. It is trivially cheaper, more flexible, simpler and faster. Economists with VBA can compete with another programmer. Only transaction costs with the need to set a task, write a technical specification disappear. And if one employee opens a file in R7 for modification and another in Excel, you can get a deadlock. At the file system level, they have files open for writing, but they do not know about files with information about each other's locks.

Well, or another example – 1C. It runs on terminal server farms under Windows. There can be 20 or 30 nodes in a farm. And the import is replaceable – or standard (only one server and forget about load balancing, scaling, fault tolerance, centralized management. Or VDI. But there the resource consumption is significantly higher – you need new equipment. Which is also not there. Maybe refuse the terminal and provide access through a browser, the benefits of 1C can? Yes, you can. But you need to rewrite the configurations. Which use mso to generate reports. There is not only that you can't just change it to another software – changing the mso version can break the work through com configurations. And there are thousands and thousands of such BUTs. In each area

· Mixing of goals. The official one is technological independence. Well, ok, we can revive the state research institute, [полу] large state-owned businesses and the budget give grants. The software is sawed off and remains the property of the state. When the state forces companies to spend money on domestic software, and first of all state and quasi-state companies (that is, the money goes either budget or profit that would otherwise go to the budget) – it is logical that at least part of this money would go to the budget. But they went the other way – the green light to small businesses. Which can arbitrarily set prices. And the client, what? He will pay. They will force him from above.

· And the last – with such a process, quality control remains, at the very least, weak. The main driver of the race for quality and adequate price, under capitalism, as the textbooks teach, is competition. But competition has been cut. Of course, there are quite decent products. The same 1C has taken a significant share of the market (and Western competitors have not prevented it). Kaspersky was present on the US market until recently. But a bunch of solutions from “domestic winters” cannot boast of functionality and adequate price, so much so that they would be bought in friendly China or India. Or at least Iran and the DPRK.

But, despite this, I do not think that it is worth falling into the extreme of pessimism. Because

1. IT existed in the USSR. There was also application software. Like a lexicon.

And even their own YA-El, Refal… Yes – there were powerful Soviet research institutes, and not reliance on private business. But the tasks were also more difficult – there was no open source then and they often developed from scratch.

2. It just so happened that in Russia they like to screw things with blue tape and there are craftsmen ready to shoe a flea. I remember my conversation with the chief engineer of one factory where I worked as a moonlighter in my youth. “The video surveillance doesn’t work. Will you fix it?” Me: “I don’t understand this. I’ve never worked with anything like this. Maybe there’s at least some documentation for the system?” Chief Engineer: “No. We wasted it. But that’s okay. You’re a smart guy. You’ll figure it out.” And he did figure it out. That’s how we live. We don’t always build working systems. But we find a way to solve the problem so that it works as little as possible.”

3. At worst, you can switch to the kind of import substitution that I observed from 2015 to 2022. Virtual. Pretending that the process is going well. That is, you can buy 9 useless programs for reporting that are not involved in the main business process, do all the work in the main and import and report – import substituted by 90%. Or you buy a so-called domestic system (in the registry), but it requires that it consists mostly of foreign components. And the business logic in the mssql storage is described. We had such a system. We bought it as a domestic one.