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Technology Buying Slump
mgcsinc writes "According to this Yahoo article from Reuters, IT buyers are continuing a trend of cutting costs, favoring utility over cutting-edge effect. Market researchers are estimating continuing doldrums in the industry and enterprise businesses see more 'bang for the buck' from making improvements in software as opposed to investing in new infrastructure. This is not necessarily awful, however, for those who hope businesses will start looking toward open source options as the cost effective alternatives..."
This probably wont encourage people to buy more.
Why replace MS software when you can just fire me and hire an Indian for $35k/yr?
Oh wait... THEY ALREADY DID THAT
Slightly offtopic, but wouldn't we (the people working in the US) benefit from having a weaker dollar? If $1 = 60 yen, then wouldn't we be competive with the rest of the world? (which hopefully will stop all this outsourcing)
Of course, foreign goods would cost more too...
I think we are getting to a point where hardware is "ahead of it's time." That is, when I was doing design work on Adobe Photoshop 5, I had a 266 MHZ PII and I remember thinking: This is all the computing power I will ever need (which is something I'm sure most of us said, accept Bill Gates, who apparently never that ;). Well, 6 years later, we have 3 GHz processors, and I wonder how long it will take business type applications to tax those processors like Office 2K with Windows XP taxes my old 266. It's the poor performance with later versions of Photoshop, etc, that convinced me to upgrade my system four years ago.
Basically, the buying slump (hardware wise) might be because everyone's hardware does what they want at a good speed with plenty room to spare. If corperations want hardware sales to go up, they'll have to wait for more complex programs (or more wildly inefficient --a.k.a. poorly programmed -- programs) to come out. And Longhorn is right around the corner, coincidentally enough.
Y2K was the mass paranoia that brought computer purchases into Q4 lockstep. Rather than seeing purchases spread across the year, there is a residual purchasing due to the Y2K "upgrades."
It could be argued that Y2K also changed IT thinking from "wouldn't it be cool if..." to "OMG we'd better check the numbers." Once people started to check the date in all systems, they began to refocus on numbers elsewhere.
Enron fell. Worldcom fell. Others fell. USA went to war. Now wireless telecom is the new new thing.
Excessively "cheap" spending practices are just as dangerous as "excessive" spending. The key to successful operation is taking the middle road between two hazardous extremes.
>say, a slow diskless VIA C3 with 64mb of RAM in a little box with PXE capability
/w boot rom, etc) for under $100 AU at its lowest price. Add in the rest, and you should be able to get these systems built for about $150 AU. They worked wonderfully with Linux.
This is very possible, and for less than the $300 AU suggested.
ECS (uggh... it's PC-Chips, but they're the only people in this game right now, from what I can tell) makes/made a board with a built on C3 processor, and built in everything (sound, video, lan
Currently they make the same thing, but with a duron processor integrated (the K7SEM-B). Same price.
You might want to build one and give it a whirl, see how it works for you (But be prepared to buy some spares! It's PC-Chips parts!)
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
The Great Depression, IMHO, was due more to liquidity problems; delfation was a symptom, not a cause.
Banking was a very different business. Loans could not be sold in a secondary market like they can be today, so you have situations where the bank had callable loan from depositors backed by a mix of non-callable mortages and callable margin and personal loans. When depositors started asking for thier money, the banks called the loans they could or sold stock the held to get the extra cash. Hoover's Federal Reserve could have helped by pumping $$$ into the system.
Plus, buying stock on margin was not regulated, so a lot of deposits were lost when the market went south. Paired with non-so-good regulation and a new central bank (recall, the Fed was about 20 years old) and you have trouble in River City.