Comment by hga

I strongly suspect a lot of this is a problem of the "no one got fired for buying IBM" type. Surely many if not most organizations have much greater faith in their ability to go high and wide than deep. The former requires opening their checkbook, the latter is "magic" from wizards/non-managers who are notoriously difficult for many to manage, assuming they really even care that much.

You're also looking at this from the viewpoint of the good of the organization, whereas we know that's generally not how things play out in the long term, e.g. Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

The deep approach results in a different balance of resources in an organization, which inevitably produces losers, like those responsible for those big fleets of machines. I can't help but notice that half of your examples were done on surplus desktop machines, and if I remember correctly jacquesm's latest reported experience was with a company that was desperate.

This is not to pour cold water on the deep approach, just to suggest in many situation how to target your advocacy and opportunities, to be prepared for blowback if you embarrass people expending massive resources for what you can fit on one idle surplus desktop, etc.