I see other technology areas, just don't see anything that's likely to be mainstream enough to become an issue for mainstream users at F500 firms in the next 2-3 years. And I'm not running into many managers who are interested in spending extra money because something may come along.
In other words, they'll upgrade the machines when they need to upgrade, which is to say when there is available, deployable and reliable software that is important to their business that requires the extra speed.
I find that I am getting a negative response when I talk about "new, emerging technolgoy areas" rather than actual products that somebody can buy. I had one CTO tell me point blank that he is still trying to make up for all the money he wasted on "getting ready" for all sorts of upcoming internet technologies that never materialized or never mattered, and to never waste his time again on something that I couldn't put on his desktop and demonstrate. This was in the finance division of a very technically saavy media company who have historically thrown lots of money at technology.
I think his attitude is reflective of a feeling at many corporations that technology has cost a huge amount of money in recent years and that much of the money spent has really not delivered substantial results. Dotcommers are not the only ones who feel "ripped off" by the outrageous promises of recent years. Lots of CFOs and CTOs are more suspect of new technologies than I've seen in years.
Average speeds I'm seeing??? Obviously there's a mix, depending on age. The average is probably around 500, with the bulk of machines in the 300-800 range. As I've said, I've seen one organization that was still using mostly 200s, which they will replace as soon as XP comes out, probably with machines in the 1Ghz range.
To the extent that new PCs are required, either as replacements for failed or completely obsolete machines or because of staff increases, they are certainly more modern and capable than the "average." However, even then, virtually everybody is telling me NOT to buy at the high end. In that environment, I can justify planning for WinXP/OfficeXP, maybe a bit more than that, but not much.
What technolgies are you seeing that are close to becoming real, stable applications, that would need the extra horsepower? I have been monitoring voice recognition software for some time as I think it could be a major CPU hog, but I don't see anything that makes me think I'm going to have a real stable application to show anybody for a while.
For the record, I work mostly with finance organizations, which may very well influence my observations.
mg |
