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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (178827)	7/22/2004 5:58:32 PM
From: BelowTheCrowd	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

You might be shocked, but most people, at most companies don't even know what Visio is, let alone have it on their desktops. In my most recent company it was routinely installed for: * Many, but not all IT folks. (Helpdesk and IT ops type people didn't need it, nor did most of our lower-level programmers.) * Some people outside of IT who were involved in business-process design and similar issues. Ideally all such people would have had it, but in practice the use of Visio generally fell to the business analysts and project managers. To the extent that others had it, it was mostly to review documents in process. * President, CFO, a couple of others who insisted on having it because it was available and they were important, even though I saw no evidence that any of them ever used it. Again, they controlled the budget and they wanted it, so we got it all for them and billed it to their cost centers. (We had only limited licenses for Visio and Project) Bottom line, maybe 30 of 800 employees had Visio, maybe 20 were active users. This kind of thing is definitely business dependent. Engineering and other "IP-focused" businesses, tend to need better and more powerful tools for managing and developing their intellectual property whether it's engineering, entertainment or anything else. Businesses in more mundane activities -- customer service, manufacturing, distribution, retail, transportation, energy, agriculture, finance, etc. are much less demanding. I have stated before and I'll state again my belief that this is part of the disconnect between Silicon Valley and much of the "real world." In the real world, large numbers of people are working on fairly mundane activities and "power users" are the exception. (Although in truth, if you go into any of the administrative or support sections of Intel, Microsoft or any of the other tech biggies, you'll find much the same situation. Lots of people who need Word, Excel, a couple of custom or enterprise app front ends, email and not a whole lot more. Hell, in my last company, 80% of the company didn't even have email...)