Soup; Apple has become the de facto standard in these industries, and was at the forefront of the revolution in desktop publishing. That hegemony is currently in danger, the gistics report notwithstanding from invasion from the bottom by Wintels as most of the software used is available on both platforms, and from the top by the rapid lowering of costs on the various workstation platforms which also have the same or functionally similar software. The rapid proliferation of service bureaus, most which now have both platforms, has killed the fat margins this industry had enjoyed for many years as it exploited the labor intensive earlier type base operations(most of which have gone broke, or changed by now to accept bureau input). In the past the printer did the bureaues work. Now the bureaus do the work and the mechanical print job gets farmed out to the lowest cost producer.
I would consider a 7 fold ROI inadequate for any computer, as the wages would far exceed that cost. We need referents here to make sense of this comparison. In addition a typical worker in a full time job should be billing $400,000 per year(ten times wages) and at this point the $12,000 difference gets trivial. Of course we need to know the real numbers, as comparisons like $26,000 to $14,000 imply a near 2:1 ratio, But it could be $426,000 to $400,000 in annual revenue and be within variance and thus not sifnificant.
I feel the platform is actually unimportant now, and the person who does the work is all important, and the work can be done equally well on both platforms.
It also reads like a biased piece, based on the wording, like the Steelworkers reports on industry doing well with them when we all know that the SIU killed millions of jobs and gave them to foreign countries with their inflexible aattitudes. SAme with UAW, 60% of all car jobs have been lost in the past 50 years driven away by union wage demands making automation affordable. A robot that works 24 hours a day, 3 times as fast as a human replaces men at a crossover point of $3 million. They will buy the robot at $3 million to replace 9 workers. That is because workers cost $100,000 per year. Lower labour costs=more jobs. But the UAW oldtimers sacrificed the young workers as they knew their seniority would keep them(the old timers) in their jobs and throw away the youths.
Bill
Bill |
