Techie,
Do you have actual data showing that companies are reducing their expenditures for PCs, or is that just theory. In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice, there is.
I work in the aerospace industry. We are constantly pushing our PCs to run applications like MS Project with bigger and bigger databases. A month ago we ran a monte-carlo tool on an MS Project database. It took several hours to run. We need both engineering applications and office applications. When programmers get fed up with slow PC response times and management won't respond, the programmers go somewhere else. We don't want to buy both engineering workstations and low cost PCs for each user (we would have to give them bigger workspaces <g>). So, as it becomes possible, we move from DEC, Silicon Graphics, and Sun to PCs. We believe this will accelerate in the next three years. We have very few secretaries that use only a word processor. All of our policies, procedures, and technical data is now accessible on-line. This insures that everyone is using a single, current copy of the relevant data. Much of this data is highly graphical. The tech pubs people do highly complex graphics, integrating technical drawings, to support presentations to our customers and to support preparation of deliverable documentation. A 266MHz machine with 64MB of memory would be a joke to them when a 400MHz machine with 128MB of memory is available. IMHO, people who imagine a business where people use only word-processors have a distorted view of what is going on.
We use voice and streaming video for training and intercompany communication. Because of its expense, we currently have limited use of streaming video. That will change in the next two years. We expect to be able to do video conferencing economically from the desktop within two years. The savings is not just in travel expenses, but also in development time and the time it takes to resolve issues because issues can be more effectively addressed immediately with participants all over the world.
The bottom line is, cycle time is the greatest factor in competitive advantage and profitability. Faster PCs reduce process cycle time throughout our business. We buy faster PCs because they give us a competitive advantage. We hope our competitors buy the least capable PCs available. Better yet, we hope they stop upgrading. They will save even more money when they turn off the lights. <gg> |
