Maurice - RE: "Some studies
estimate a cost of $12,000 a year in related support costs ..."
I have seen and heard these estimates for years. They don't compute, in my estimation.
Either idiots run these PCs and they have to be supported by highly paid, near-genius MIS technicians or someone is fudging the numbers.
Think of any decent corporate managers - would they even begin to tolerate a $12,000/year SUPPORT expense for their employee's PCs? H*ll, most managers won't even allow occasional lunches to be charged back to the company for a few bucks a week let alone $12,000/yr PER COMPUTER worth of hand-holding and baby sitting for computer support !
Suppose a medium size company has 5000 employees and 2000 computers. At $12,000 per PC this support comes to $24,000,000 PER YEAR. That's right - $24 million per year! And this is support only - not the cost of the PCs. Even a new set of software updates PER YEAR couldn't account for that - and who updates software yearly?
How much are the MIS support guys being paid? Let's assume a generous $65,000 /year. This means one MIS guy covers 5+ computers and that 369 MIS guys must exist to support these PCs. You will have more MIS people than all other administrative personnel combined.
That's 369/5000 = 7.4% of the company in MIS alone. Do these numbers make sense to you? Why, a CEO can save $12,000,000 per year just by downsizing his MIS staff. A good CEO would do this in a heartbeat if his per PC bill was $12,000 per year in support.
(I am neglecting any hardware expenses related to networking since a PC or an NC should incur similar networking expenses.)
The biggest argument against the NC, and in my mind the most relevant, is that it provides nothing new - just a different way of doing something PCs today already do - connect to the internet. It enables NOTHING.
When PCs were new, they provided an individual with a box that could be a word processor in one minute, a spreadsheet cruncher the next minute, and a database organizer in a third minute - all right in front of its proud owner, and in control of the owner. Within a few years the secretarial/typing pools were history - every one became their own secretary. It was kind of a reverse "male liberation" - no longer were engineers or accountants or whatever at the mercy of a secretary who had to be cottled and bribed just to type up your monthly report!
Paul |
