Having gone from all dumb terminal work in the 80's to dumb terminal emulator on the PC's in the 90's, I have a fair view of big corporate plays in the California arena. Here are two factors unmentioned:
1)e-mail, and the corporate topology of e-mail, is often what drives hardware replacement. PROFS and other character-based e-mail is always a target of GUI-oriented managers. As performance with e-mail suffers, or becomes less compatible with an older platform, the surest fix is to upgrade to a new machine, rather than find a software solution. This is a result of the proliferation of programs, especially Java applets, on any typical machine. Rather than unravel each user's concurrent pile of applications, god knows how modified, it is easier to buy new replacement machines, as new e-mail software is brought online.
2) More and more, large corporate architectures are server-based, and adding more servers, rather than replacing existing servers with more powerful ones (though both episodes take place) is the more common history. Even for the most basic reports and calculations, users far more often enlist expert help (ie, in the IT dept), then accept a "paper printout" at their printer, or by "snail mail". If you are piling up all the ATM transactions at a bank, or polling ATMs to see if they're active, this is where you put your CPU power. But getting faster at that, than the speed of polling and compiling in 1997, adds no advantage. Only aerodynamics, and hydrodynamics, etc are helped by more CPU power. E-mail users are SCREAMING--NO MORE UPGRADES!!!!
extra note) The only people needing a "graph" in reporting, are the annual report people. Daily knowledge, reporting, monthly reporting, never relies on graphs: the =real numbers= are alway required, and the "graph picture" is just a "pretty thing" added on, and ultimately discarded (I have found). I find the idea of the average corp user even doing actual computing (other than pixel-math for a picture) more than once a day avg., an exaggeration. |
