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Computer Makers Cater to Big Business, IT Depts.
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "By some estimates, twice as many computers are in the hands of individuals and very small organizations than are in the control of corporate IT departments, Walt Mossberg writes in the Wall Street Journal. Yet the computer industry caters too much to big businesses and their IT staff, Mossberg argues: 'The computer industry loves, and caters to, the IT segment because it buys machines in large quantities and is run by a geeky priesthood that speaks the industry language. By contrast, the non-IT camp, even though it is larger in the aggregate, buys one, two or three machines at a time and tends to be nontechnical. ... This focus on the corporate world can have real, and sometimes negative, consequences for consumers and small businesses. For example, some of the big security problems in Microsoft's software in recent years came because the company included features used only by corporate IT staffs in the products it sold to everyone. One was a communications feature, meant for network administrators, which sleazy operators misused to bombard people with ads. Why was that on my PC in the first place?'"
I'm in the IT business and I tend to agree with the ideas in this article but I don't necessarily agree with the negative connotations.
My company primarily consults with large corporations in the contracting and engineering fields (internationally). We don't offer any advice for what brand of hardware to buy, for what software to run, or for what employees should and shouldn't know. What we do offer is advice in how the company can become more profitable, more efficient, or both.
Your average home PC owner does not look at a computer as a way to make more profit or save more time -- generally speaking. I firmly believe that the average home PC user sees the PC as a form of entertainment, just like a VCR or DVD player. As such, the ability for manufacturers to offer value added options or set a realistic upgrade/replacement path is significantly reduced. My own family wonders why PCs from 5 years ago are no longer usable but their 10 year old VCR still ticks.
Beyond even the value added options and replacement path, you also have residual output costs such as customer service and even warranty costs. Many of my customers have warranties on their hardware, but their in-house IT division will work on replacing failed hardware (and their own cost!) and repair software flaws, rather than calling the supplier. The employee that uses the failed PC is back to work faster this way, so more money is saved than spent. The home PC user, on the other hand, is more likely to call Dell or Gateway, and when they do, they're losing their heads over what may be a user error.
We tried for 2 years to offer services to the home users. I will never go that way again. The minute a customer asks me for home PC advice, I send them to Best Buy and the Geek Squad. I have 3 customers who "force" us to service their home PCs, but we charge the US$300 per hour -- no joke. The only way for me to profit is to charge them in advance for the "warranty" issues that we have to pay for.
Finally, the home PC user is much more price conscious than the corporate IT buyer. It is easier to sell a corporate buyer on the return-on-investment figures than it is to tell a home user that buying a better printer will mean cheaper ink, or that buying a better scanner will save them hours over the lifetime based on speed and quality issues alone.
There is nothing wrong with avoiding sales to a specific group -- especially the home user. When you go into business, you focus on not the number of sales you can get, or the gross profit from all those sales as a total figure. You look at all input costs, output costs and stability of the customer base. The home user offers the worst ratio of all 3 of these business variables. The article ends with the key: Alienware is aimed mainly at gamers, eMachines at bargain hunters. Gamers, who shop around online for the rock bottom price, offering the retailer almost no profit. Bargain hunters, who do the same. Both who demand top level service for rock bottom prices.
... business goes where the money is. This article should be a Fox News Alert.
'course, I'm preaching to the choir here on Slashdot. He may have some good points elsewhere in the article, but his asinine tunnel vision wrecks his creditiblity. He's just pandering to all the "Sues in Accounting" who gets upset because they can't install a holiday screen saver they downloaded on "their" computer.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
the bigger companies aren't such cheap skates. Having worked at a small ISP and now working at a large medical company, its like night and day. The attitude is much different too, at the ISP we would skimp on the quality of things and sometimes try to save money here and there. At the larger company, we only buy high quality stuff.
I take it by 'communication service' the article was on about the Messenger service. I agree with this completely, but the reverse is true too - I installed Windows Server 2003 on a new server at work last week and IE has all the usual MSN radio links built into the favourites. WTF? And why is the indexing service built into a consumer OS when nobody uses it?
I usually don't care for Microsoft bashing but they especially need to learn how to differentiate a consumer and corporate OS rather than through having different splash screens.
... when you go to get a slice of pie, you want the biggest slice in the pan. Also, there is the volume issue. The less flavors you offer, the more of a single flavor you can "buy", which reduces cost for everyone, including the end user.
Given their choice...
Car makers would manufacture only for fleet buyers.
Arms manufacturers would only market to military sales.
Food processing plants would only sell to volume buyers (fast food chains, etc..)
Toy and clothes manufactureres would only sell to Wal Mart.
Manufacturers aren't really interested in retail.
Face it: individual consumers are finicky, difficult people to work with. A manufacturer is going to take a *large* cut in up-front sales profits to reap the benefits of lower pre (R&D, customizations) and after-market (support & service) costs. If I can sell 10,000 units of anything to one buyer, or have to sell 10,000 units to 10,000 buyers, I'm gonna do the former!
Even if I have to sell them more cheaply.
This is precisely why the "middle man" has evolved in most markets. He's not there to benefit you the consumer, but the manufacturer and wholesaler.
The one danger in all of this, of course, is that as the number of buyers decreases the prices you can get on the manufacturing side will decrease. If only Wal Mart buys your widgets, then Wal Mart can demand almost any price for them including selling them for a loss.
Get off my lawn.
Because the typical response to marketing software, be it through retail channels for commercial software, or as free software for *nix variants, is to offer a "one-size fits all" solution. There may be variations for differences in platform usage (ie., desktop, server, etc.) but everyone pays lip service to the differences in how users work within a given platform.
Consider Windows XP, with the Home and Professional versions. Both are much the same thing, with all the same utilities, but XP Home has some window-dressing (ha-ha) to dumb it down for home users.
Variations within the Linux world are even less differentiated on the user side, with most of the real differences appearing in update methodology. Sometimes the differences are political, with no real affect on the user interface.
On the commercial software side, having multiple variants of a single platform software set can lead to some real problems in marketing. Money would have to be spent to emphasize the differences between sets and there's a very real risk of upsetting consumers when they realize they undershot their needs.
On the free software side, the downside comes from alienating developers and users, who may feel left out if their favorite projects are not considered important enough to be included in a distribution.
It's a catch-22 and in the end, it's just cheaper and easier to make less-specialized, more inclusive software releases.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
Apple, having long given up on the "big business" share of the market, caters to individual users quite well.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
The rash of Microsoft security problems isn't because it was targeted at the corporate market, it is because it never had a security model to begin with, and then, to the extent that Microsoft manage to retrofit one, they immediately subverted in by introducing ActiveX. ActiveX was a feature that no customer, corporate or otherwise, was demanding. But Microsoft needed it to prevent Java from getting traction. The rest, as they say, is history.
...if you use computers to make money, you're in the minority. Just check out my profile for more on that wisdom. The people who really make proper use of computers are people at home using them for creative endeavours that will never see a dime. People who use them to make music, print artistic photos, or even write their own *FREE* (in both senses) software are the people who make proper use of a computer. Anyone using it to try and turn a profit is just a talentless hack who thinks of a PC as a money making machine. If, and only if, you HAPPEN to make a profit doing something creative with a PC whilst actually doing the creative part out of love rather than avarice, then you are properly using your computer. This means that if you are a web designer who creates web sites because you like to and you would do it for free, then you're doing it right. The fact that people might pay you is incidental and vastly unimportant. That's the way I work with audio and music production on my computers. I love doing that work, so I do it for people at no cost. However, 99% of the time they demand that I charge them something and my asking prices tend to be low. So even there, they might force me to charge more. Case in point. I did some very simple photo editing for a friend of a friend recently. It took me about an hour and a half to do the actual work and my computer about 15 minutes to save out a postscript print file for large format printing. I told the guy I would only charge $10 an hour because that's all that photo editing work is worth. He disagreed and when he saw the results he paid me $50 an hour. I told him he didn't need to, but he insisted and thus I got a little over $50 when all was said a done. A nice surprise but completely unwarranted. Digital photo editing is not hard, it's not a skill and certainly doesn't call for that kind of pay.
All those businesses with their IT departments are doing a disservice to computers. The industry seems to have largely forgotten that computers are simply a tool and only useful when in skilled hands. And skilled hands do not equate to profit, they equate to talent and a love of the craft. That is the ONLY reason to work with computers. Making money is simply a side benefit and a highly overrated one at that.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
"Yep... this guy sounds exactly like a typical user [...] He mentions not being able to use his instant messanger. I guess he hasn't been paying attention to the rash of IM-based worms recently. [...] 'course, I'm preaching to the choir here on Slashdot."
Horse hockey! I've been a sysadmin and/or programmer for nearly 20 years and I can assure you that I agree with him fully on the damage that lack of access to new technology does. Cutting off access to IM is the lazy way out that will ultimately make the companies that do so crumble under their own weight. I can't count the number of times that I've run into a problem, fired up IM, and asked a friend what I'm doing wrong. Sometimes that friend works down the hall. Sometimes he or she is around the globe. I get an answer in a few seconds and go about my work, and my friends avail themselves of the same luxury. How long does this guy have to trudge through mailing list archive after mailing list archive trying to find his answers? Or are those resources cut off to him as well?
I work for a company that makes its reputation from solving problems in weeks that the industry around us would take years or decades to "study". I can't afford to have some punk kid with his hands on a firewall configuration tell me that I can't have access to the information that I need.
Have security concerns? Address them! You just have to take as a criteria that your users still need to get work done.
Home computer:
price: $1100
retail profit: $150
wholesale profit: $100
manufacturers profit: $50
cost: $800 (includes warehousign and shipping)
Office desktop:
price: $1100
retail profit: $0 (sold directly)
Wholesale profit: $0 (sold directly)
manufacturers profit: $300
cost: $800 (includes warehousign and shipping)
net result: The manufacterers care lessd about you.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Same utilities?
How do I fine tune user permissions in XP Home? Do I have anything between the two user levels? I don't think I can even limit who has access to shared folders and printers with XP Home.
How do I use dynamic disks in XP Home?
How about NTFS Encryption in XP Home?
Did they ever add Remote Desktop to XP Home?
Even more than the IM worms, etc., many of the original complaints in the article stem from legislation forced upon the business world. I've worked in financial institutions where Gramm-Leach-Bliley rules, I've been in healthcare where HIPAA rules, and every public company has to follow the mandates of Sarbanes-Oxley.
We block IM at work to the outside word because the auditors forced us to do so. We block access to web-based email sites (Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, etc.) because the auditors forced us to do so. When dealing with financial, patient, and/or business sensitive records, it's too easy for someone to forward them via IM or web-based email sites. We block many web sites, because they have no business purpose and the person paying the bills (the CIO) mandates that we don't waste bandwidth resources.
We force passwords to be more complex and expire after 90 days. Why? Because the auditors forced us to do so. We don't allow users to install software on the PCs on their desks. Why? Because we became tired of fighting Gator and all the other "fun" spyware. It's also an audit finding not to have protections against spyware, virii, etc. Beyond that, it's just good practice to make sure that there is a centralized group who tracks what is installed where.
I don't like being the "bad guy," but I'm forced to be. The average user has to realize that the PC on their desk isn't their home machine. They didn't pay for it and they can't do with it as they please. This also goes for the network bandwidth, the phone system, etc. It's just the way it is.
"It's too bad stupidity isn't painful." - A. S. LaVey
Yes it is true that computer manufactures tend to cater to the IT departments at large companies. One big reason for that is the computer sitting on a users desk is an advertisement for the manufacturer. If that computer runs well and never seems to have any major problems than the user is more likely to purchase that brand of computer.
By some estimates, twice as many computers are in the hands of individuals and very small organizations than are in the control of corporate IT departments,
Well duh there are more people employed by small businesses than large corporations so it only makes sense that there are more computers in the hands of small businesses. Now how about what would be a relevant fact for this article? How many computers are purchased each year by small and large businesses? Who cares how many they have. If they only replace the 4 computers in their office every 6 years Dell is not going to be calling them asking what they want in the next line of computers!
For example, some of the big security problems in Microsoft's software in recent years came because the company included features used only by corporate IT staffs in the products it sold to everyone.
This guy really needs to get a clue if he thinks Microsoft caters to anyone. I have never seen a large corporation use the messenger service as the writer implies. If Microsoft catered to large corporations there would be nothing installed by default and it would be added as needed. Do large corporations really want Solitaire, Lookout Express, MSN messenger, UPNP, computer browser, messenger service, music links, Windows Media player and IE? Yes they can all be turned off but if they were catering to large business they would never be there in the first place. Microsoft just crams this stuff in for everyone.
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Karma: Somewhere between SCO and Microsoft
Yeah, what the guy says is true, and much more than that. Everybody wants a slice of that corporate pie. The profits are bigger and they have IT departments to handle the simple problems of deployment (which cuts the cost of service). It's why Intel is the biggest graphics manufacturer and why their CPUs outsell AMD despite AMD being the superior chip. The corporate PC manufacturer can source the cheapest parts by buying bulk and maximize profits. If a machine goes south (but most won't as they are not taxed doing most corporate work), it's cheap to replace it.
Windows seized that corporate market way back in the late eighties. That's why you get so much crap on windows machines. If Apple could crack the corporate market in a big way, or a major Linux/hardware partner, do you think they would not cater to that cash cow, bringing whatever computer hay it wanted? The holy grail for Linux is mass acceptance - and that really means corporate desktop acceptance. That would bring compromises that would spill over into the home market. You build a baseline for your hardware or software and branch from there. It's where the money is after all. If the baseline is the rich corporate mother lode, guess what even the home users get a flavour of? It's why I build my own machines and install my own software. Look no further that the recent reviews of the Dell gaming machine, loaded with crapware. Look at who their biggest customers are and you can see the packaged one size fits all mentality.
BTW, I wouldn't expect to keep the business accounts of the people who 'force' you to service their home PCs (if my guess is correct and that is how they do it).
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
What's your IP address?
Well, IM should be provided by the company, just as with email and telephones. That way they can manage it, both technically and in terms of policy. It's totally ridiclous that you need to go install AIM or Yahoo to communicate with your coworkers at most shops. You want to ask Fred down the hall about project status, and you find yourself clicking on "SuperBozo1975" in your "buddies" list.
Imagine if you got hired into a new job and the IT Guy came by and told you they didn't have an email server, so you should get a hotmail account and tell everyone your address. I'd probably start looking for a new job right away. But that's basically what they do with IM.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
That the hardware and software vendors cater to IT departments because "they're geeks and they speak the industry language" is bullshit.
They cater to IT departments because the vast majority of them are run by total incompetents who have no idea what they're doing, and have no idea how to value hardware and software. I run a small business' IT department. Hell, I *am* the IT department. 40 some-odd servers, 20 or so desktops, 10 or so laptops. I do all the purchasing, and let me tell you, they sure as heck don't cater to *me*. They cater to the people who're willing to spend $80,000 on a crap piece of software which could be done by one of our dozen in-house coders (we're a software development shop) in a weekend. Or by me for maybe $2500 worth of time.
They cater to morons who think that "Fibre Channel" drives are better than SCSI, and so are willing to spend $3000 for a 150GB drive. They cater to people who think that there's something magical about SCSI, and so think that even if 10kRPM 300GB drives were available with SATA connectors instead of SCSI, the SCSI drives would still be worth $1500. (Here's a hint - the differences between Fibre Channel drives and SCSI drives is the connector. They may do some extra QA on FC drives, to up the MTBF, but this is what RAID is for.)
Vendors do NOT cater to IT departments because IT departments "know the language". They cater to IT departments because they tend to be massively over-funded for what they provide, and they're willing to piss away huge quantities of money.
That's the thing I hate most about the IT industry right now. Prices aren't set by competitive pressure between the vendors, they're set by twits not knowing that it's silly to pay $50,000 for some shared storage they don't need. Why should IBM sell me a 10kRPM 150GB SCSI drive for $500 when they can sell it to an idiot for $1500? (They'll sell them to me for $1000, and that's the lowest they'll go. I still think it's horribly overpriced.)
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Just a couple of comments...
Sometimes you can't allow a technology while still keeping things secure. In the example of IM, you could run an internal IM server on Jabber, or what not, and avoid many potential problems. If you want access to AIM/Yahoo/MSN/etc with the outside world, then you open up another avenue for compromise, and one that you can't secure. You might not lose an entire machine, but the user account is compromised, and any data they have access to. Once that compromise is on the network, it can move to try to compromise other hosts. This is a very severe problem, and you have to do what you can to avoid it.
Content filtering is another wonderful item. Sometimes you are required by law to filter, sometimes the order comes from upper management, seeking to reduce unproductive hours. A whole lot of users will play games and surf the web for hours a day. Management doesn't like that. Most of the time, the decision to filter content does not come from IT, but from above them.
It's the same story when users find out what kind of data you have to log (depending on what sector you're in). This could be anything from backups of all data, to what internet sites are being access, to emails, and the content of those emails, perhaps phone call logs, etc. In general, IT doesn't want to log this stuff, because doing that, and backing it all up, is a big hassle. Sometimes you just have to do it, though.
The post here makes it out like there is some sort of unwholesome prejudice in favor of big companies and large orders. This just ignores the universal effect large customers and uniform market segments have.
What do you think makes unions so powerfull? Why do we have anti-monopoly laws which are enforced even when a company is shy of complete monopoly (e.g. controls 85% of the marketplace). Quite simply a large segment of the market that acts together has more power than a similarly or larger sized segment of the market which makes individual choices.
If Jim bob decides he needs feature A on his OS he might decide not to buy WinXP if it doesn't exist. However, if Jim, the IT manager at a fortune 500 company, has the same opinion MS might lose thousands of sales. Who do you think it makes more sense to go write code specifically for?
This issue is only magnified by two additional points. First is that the individual buyers *aren't* geeks so don't have a clue about what various features mean. So if corporate users aren't going to buy XP if it doesn't have that annoying messaging feature present and individual users aren't even going to know enough to think about it including it will make MS more money! Secondly many home users want the same OS as they have at work. FOCUSING ON IT DEPARTMENTS IS FOCUSING ON HOME SALES!!
Finally I would like to say I don't think this is a problem in the first place. Allowing that damn little messaging thing was just a mistake b/c MS didn't think that anyone would be on a real network except corporate users. If they had they just would have put in default options for a home config turning it off. In general as apple has shown with "OS X" you don't need to cripple a OS to make it good for the consumer. Rather you just need some sensible defaults so the corporate features and other powerfull options aren't security holes.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
My own family wonders why PCs from 5 years ago are no longer usable but their 10 year old VCR still ticks.
Dude, where did they get a VCR like that? I want one!
BTW, noticeably absent from this Mossberg column was the "Katherine Boehret" byline - she has done a lot of the heavy lifting for a while (older columns often said "contributed by") and glad to see that not that long ago, she moved up to the byline.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Everyone know that actually making a sale is were the real costs are. It is why fastfood places are so keen to supersize you. Yes you get more food for less but the cost to them is not the food, it is getting you into the restaurant in the first place.
Same with computers, having a store/warehouse, a tech support, an inventory and advertising is the real cost and remains pretty much the same wether the customer then buys 1 machine or a thousand. Leaving it easy to conclude that more profit will be made on the 1000 volume sale. (It is also the reason Intel won't sell you a single chip. They only sell them in batches of a 1000 because selling them seperate would make it impossible to generate enough profit.)
Further more I do not get his crap about software being included in small setups vs large setups. I think he is talking about that net send tool (sorry am been on linux to long) wich was used for a while for spam. The one he doesn't mention might have been the personal webserver wich had a worm attack a few years ago that was highly amusing (to a guy not responsible for the windows servers only the real ones).
Well these were security risks not needed for a lot of setups? Well yeah but we are talking MS Windows here. The same MS windows were hardcore servers are vulnerable to the WMF exploit because for some reason a MS SQL server includes image rendering code. And a browser. And a media player. And a instant messenger. And directX and god knows what more.
The knife of MS including everything and the kitchen sink into its OS cuts both ways but is also the MS way. Don't like it, don't use it. It is hardly fair to blame the entire tech industry for the faults of one company.
And that is my real beef with this article. It should have been a rant against MS not computer makers. I never seen a consumer Dell PC that included unneeded features like hardware scsi raid they forgot to tell you about. I WISH!!! How many times have you bought a dirt cheap machine and found they fobbed you with damn pro ECC memory eh?
Blame MS for MS faults and blame users for buying MS. Do not fault Dell for not hacking the shit out of Windows to make it a secure OS.
Oh and the dumbfuck author forgot one tiny little thing. In a number of update EULA's MS gives itself the right to get access to the machine the software is installed on. This is often in clear violation of big industry rules. Banks especially have very strict rules about allowing outsiders (MS) access to their network. It is one of the dirty little secrets that ain't talked about much but you can be damn sure that NO bank is willing to honor those EULA. They would be in serious legal trouble if they did.
So perhaps MS really caters to nobody? Odd then that it still outsells everyone else? Oh well, back to my nice secure Linux machine. At least I know who control the code here [NSA SElinux module: Yes US]
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I think the difference here is that you are a sysadmin. Even if you don't run a Unix desktop, you likely keep up with the worms, viruses, and vulnerabilities on a daily basis; I know that one of the first things I do when I start in on a sysadmin gig is to sign up to every security mailing list related to the software that I administrate. You also likely know what trojans are, take care to not use insecure software, and also, use your computer for work during working hours, with occasional posts on Slashdot.
The 'average office user' is nowhere near as attentive to any of this; they don't get why it's a bad idea to install a screensaver they got in an email from someone they don't know, or why they shouldn't look at that 'funny picture' that some random person sent them over IM. The idea that they can cause millions of dollars in damage through their carelessness never enters their mind, because a computer is nowhere near as dangerous-looking as a forklift or scalpel.
Being a programmer doesn't make you immune, either; at my last job, one of the senior coders brought in a CD with some software from home, including a screensaver...yep, trojaned. Because he was senior, he had access to a lot of data, and it took us (the IS staff) about three full-time days to assess and deal with all the damage; I'm just happy it was a Unix shop, with tight security (we found the worm because it was banging against our firewall trying to phone home). If we had been an all-MS shop, there would have been a months' worth of damage control.
The way I usually handle this is that I provide a Jabber server for internal users to chat amongst each other, and limit outside IM access. If I can get them, I ask for computers in the employee breakrooms, lock those down tightly, and then allow both IM and unrestricted Web access so that people can chat with friends and check their personal mail on break. This has worked fairly well, both with management[1], and with the users[2]
[1] It's a 'no-cost' option that adds an employee 'perk' *and* increases system security.
[2] People want to do this at their desk, of course, but usually respond well to the argument of 'Well, it's either the kiosk, or we have to monitor and log all of your IM conversations...'.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
I fully agree with the "typical user". I have yet to discover a large, centralized IT infrastructure departement that provides an adequate service, not to mention a good one.
Such departements is actually behave very much like worms. They infiltrate all systems and consume computer resources at a high rate, denying them to the people for whose use these systems actually are, with detrimental results to the business. A serious worm attack may cost a company a full working day; that is bad but after all it is only 0.5% or so of yearly productivity. Working on computers installed and maintained by a large IT infrastucture departement typically results in the loss about 20 minutes per day for all users; i.e. about 4% of productivity. And that is not taking into account all the administrative paperwork they require, or the health damage from computer-anger induced stress.
The fundamental reason for this, I suppose, is that the metrics IT uses as a measure of success tend to be completely unconnected with the goals of the business they have to support. I have no problem with security being high on the list of priorities; but usually performance appears to be near the bottom of that list --- if it is on it at all. And it is an unfortunate characteristic of IT infrastructure departements that they do not have to do any demanding work with the systems they install and manage; typically they use e-mail and some administrative software, but no heavy applications. In contrast, the departements that suffer the most (and complain the most) tend to be the ones that do: Programming, computer modelling, statistical analysis, datawarehousing.
Closely related to this is the tendency to standardisation, of hardware and software, that is exhibited by IT departements. That is just about tolerable in an office environment, although it results in a software environment that is a monoculture and very vulnerable to infection. (And usually at least a full generation behind the state of the art.) In an industrial or R&D environment the loss of flexibility that this entails is a major source of trouble, but an IT infrastructure group won't see this because it doesn't live in the same world. Characteristically, IT will allow only a few computer configurations, none of which is up to the job for a particular application (if only because the boards simply won't fit in), and one OS, which is not suitable either. IT will balk at spending an extra $2,000 for a more powerful PC, even though it is needed for the exploitation of an investment of $500,000.
Now, I admit that in any IT group there will be sensible people with whom a solution can be doctored out; unfortunately they are rarely encouraged by the culture of such a departement. The first problem is that such a team lives by regulations and often regards the rulebook as sufficient justification to do something, even if this blantantly conflicts with common sense. The second problem is that large teams encourage specialisation and task-sharing. It sounds innocent, but it actually means the responsibility for ordering, installing, delivering and connecting a PC will be split over at least four people, and at least eight for a server. Hence, the larger your IT group, the more you have to run around in circles to get the solution you need.
Of course it gets even worse when such large departements actually get involved in defining and executing software projects. They are almost guarantueed to organize a team that is too large, too distant from the reality of the processes it has to support, and conservative rather than creative. The typical result is a spectacular failure, a useless system delivered at a cost of millions of dollars.
Oh yes, I admit that there needs to be a central IT infrastructure group: For maintaining networks and servers, there is no other option. But such groups should be given power strictly on a need-to-have basis. All IT work that does not need to be done by a central group should be decentralized, in small teams that should
Firewalls are great in the same way that airbags and seatbelts are great. In a perfectly running, perfectly operated vehicle, they're completely unnecessary. Even in the best circumstance they're at worst a very mild inconvenience, and in the event of a god-forbid, they can save your life. The benefits clearly outweigh the risks. (Note, for purposes of this analogy, I'm not discussing the camps who argue these things cost more lives than they save, the discussion isn't really centered on vehicular life-saving devices, rather on the idea that such devices aren't necessary under perfect circumstances.)
However, running without a firewall at home because you consider your system to be secure is foolish, I don't care how "secure" you've made your systems, for one reason: Zero-Day Exploits. The most security minded, conscientious, and diligent individual in the world can still benefit from the protections afforded by a firewall the next time a worm hits the net for an unpatched security vulnerability.
Just like no matter how well maintained, and how safely you drive your car, there's still the chance you get creamed at a stoplight by a drunk driver.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Walt is probably one of the most famous PC columnists around, because he's been a columnist for decades. I think most people find he's got his head screwed on right.
I don't know how you got off on the wild tangent about providing support services for home users- that's not what Mossberg is complaining about. He's complaining that the majority of users are getting insecure features that are useless to them. Much of why IE is so insecure is because Microsoft loaded up all this CRAP so enterprises could have a user click a link and get some widget installed onto their machine...or so that an enterprise could roll out a webapp that could be virtually unlimited in how it could mess with the client. Hell, half the time, stuff is set up specifically so the user CAN'T override it, because the IT department doesn't want the user to be able to avoid a virus scan, or somesuch.
Yank it all out, and at the very least TURN IT OFF BY DEFAULT. Let the boys with the enterprise management tools use said tools to build systems with the stuff installed + turned on.
Please help metamoderate.
If people would ask me the #1 reason to look for another job: The IT department.
Diverse and interesting work, nice colleagues, bosses who value my work highly, and a good salary... but, that IT department.
Every morning the thought of having to switch on that damn PC and struggle against it for the whole day... Need help on a complex Excel function? Press F1, then go for a cup of coffee.
Need to visit a supplier and give a presentation? Be prepared to apologize, repeatedly, until your machine has finally become functional. And yes, their IT manager will helpfully tell you that you should talk to your IT manager about system performance.
And the hardware of that laptop is decent enough. Just overloaded with bells, whistles, and security systems by IT, to the point where it barely worked.
End result? I have often enough taken work home to do it on my own PC, after hours. Nothing critical, certainly no patient data involved, but probably against the regulations. I owned a system with decent performance and the necessary software, which IT could not deliver for me on a reasonable time scale (although it was downloadable). And doing some work in my own time was far less annoying than having to do it on IT-installed systems.
Frankly, people in large companies often do not just think of the IT people as "bad guys", they think of them as hopeless. If they have an IT problem, their reaction is not: "Aargh, we will have to talk to those bastards in IT again." Their reaction is: "Well, it is an IT problem, so nothing will be done about it, and therefore we will just have to live with it. Asking IT for help is no use anyway."
If you think I sound harsh: Actually I often enough find myself defending the IT people against the criticisms of my colleagues, which are even harsher (and often less than fair).
Gee, I thought wake-on-lan was something EVERYBODY wanted!
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Open Source Sysadmin
Heh. You failed attempt at making the home market sound attractive has fallen flat on its ass. The home user market is cheap. They already paid for the box and don't want to pay for service. "It came broken with the little monkey on it" they will argue ...and argue and argue and argue. They want 'home service'. They don' no nuttin bout the 'puter, but want people to explain it all to them. It's a bit hard explaining in detail exactly what went wrong. They have no concept of what goes on, but want a detailed explanation (4 years of education for free) in about 5 minutes. When you try and ultimately fail, you are either 1. talking down to them, or 2. not willing to explain. They will then take your 3 hours of work (while they look over your shoulder and shout 'whats that for?' in your ear, while the kids whine 'is the computer fixxed yet?' followed by the homeowner telling you 'is it going to be much longer?', only to have them ignore your advice as being from a mindless geek who they don't trust to doing a good job anyway, followed by their fucking the machine up exactly the same way they did before, and then yelling at you that you aren't done yet (they cheerfully broke in 30 seconds what your 3 hours fixed, and now they don't want to pay you, or they want you to 'fix it again for free'. Home users are like having 8 year olds running a nuclear plant. There is no way you can win with them (except by telling them that it's broken, buying it from them for $50, and selling them a new machine for $3000, which they will break within a day or so).
I know Circuit City at least, uses independent contractors. They post things to computerrepair (apparently now named Onforce), and I think i saw a couple of Geek Squad postings. Point is, the pay was awful. Partly, this is because much of the requests are doable by your average geeky highschooler (image a computer, install a print driver, "remove spyware"). Maybe these are simply the worst of the worst, the things that the company has decided cannot be done profitably (or fast enough). But look at it this way; the length of time it takes to perform your average virus and spyware scan is typically outside the range of what they're willing to pay.
Best Buy et all are capable of offering the service because they already have a large store of parts and a nationwide marketing budget. If I could charge 230 dollars for an onsite visit, that might be worth it, though we've no way of telling how popular these expensive services are. Either way I've got to compete with the likes of GeekSquad on price and services. So when the grandparent says that he will never service home users again, perhaps its because they simply lack the resources that GS does to efficiently help these people. Specialization is entirely possible, with one firm being better at (and being known for being good at) home and another at business.
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Open Source Sysadmin
If any of you have been working with computers for over 20 years, you know that until the mid 90's or so, the schism between consumer and IT PCs was a hairline crack at most. Back then, there was no "consumer grade" variants of DOS, Win 3.x, or Win95. The OS used at home was *exactly* the same as used in the office. Applications (word processors, utilities, etc) were pretty much the same way as well, with no major distinction between home/business use. Plus back then, hardware & software came with manuals that were half-inch thick BOOKS and tech support quality was great (maybe because people usually only called support as last resort). The average home user had a genuine interest in computers and was up to the task of manually editing a batch or INI file.
In the office, PCs were primitively networked and the variety of applications were pretty sparse. IT departments had a fairly loose grip on the average user's PC and the only major security concern was viruses or user ineptitude.
Fast forward to the present and what do we have? Windows has a patronizing 'Fisher Price' interface and is brain-dead easy to configure for basic tasks. Windows Vista will have SEVEN variants. There's a plethora of apps for every picayune interest out there (do people really buy programs to design a deck or quilt??) Heavy duty applications (office apps, graphics, web site creation, etc) have watered down variants. Today's average PC user has so little clue how their system works it's no wonder Geek Squad is raking in the cash. Today's users never see a command line prompt and soil themselves when they do. Now with DRM and "Trusted Computing" around the corner, it seems the home PC will be little more than an entertainment center that interfaces with the Internet (so Joe User can get porn, spam, and shop at Amazon.com).
In the world of IT, the PC has become a terminal on steroids. Hardware is barely "good enough" (who needs more than 256MB of RAM or USB 2.0?), Windows is heavily locked down, desktop apps are limited to what IT deems "safe" (non-MS apps are always viewed warily), and don't even THINK about customizing more than the desktop wallpaper or boot WAV file. Between keyloggers, Internet access logs, and remote access to your local hard drive, you are always under the digital gaze of IT. All for "security" of course. In the near future, the average office drone's computer will be a boxless thin-client terminal and the only thing a user can do is launch an app to retrieve, edit, and store files on a remote server.
"PC" once stood for Personal Computer (with the emphasis on 'personal') but now I have to wonder if that is really true anymore...
[end gruff old fart rant]Starting with WinNT, it's pretty clear (at least to me :-) that the primary push in Microsoft was to take capabilities away from the end user and give them to corporate IT. In one respect, this was a response to the increasing complexity of administring PCs. But I think that was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Corporate IT departments grew because Windows was so labor-intensive to administer, Windows added more features for centralized administration, thereby adding to the administrative workload. But how do corporate IT directors and CIOs get measured? Not by their impact on productivity, but rather by the size of their staff! (Imagine how different Corporate IT would look if your CIO got charged for every hour any computer user in the company was not productive because of computer problems...)
:-)
That's why accurate TCO measures are so important and also why they're so difficult. It's hard to measure the impact of loss-of-productivity on staff, and so few corporations have any alternative to their very labor-intensive Windows environments. (If they do have Macs, for example, they often don't believe the comparative numbers they get for those Macs. And what's worse, is their own billing charges often work against a good comparison. How many Windows problems get fixed in 15 minutes? It was very rare that I ever had a Mac question that went more than 15 minutes, but I'm sure corporate IT charged an hour for the call....) Similarly, when Corporate IT looks at support for alternative platforms, they use their (very high) Windows numbers and extrapolate. Where I used to work, part of the problem was that so few corporate IT people understood Macs in the first place, that they were used only as the last resort. Mostly we solved our own problems, either as individuals, or as a Community of Interest (mac-users mailing list)
dave
Best Buy, CompUSA, Fry's, etc ... buy mass quanties of computers ... the THEY sell to individuals. The quantities are no different between corporations and large resellers.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Just a quick compliment... I love your posts on your business, I operate an IT consulting business myself and find myself relating to a lot of what I've read you post lately(especially that other thread where you discussed paying minimum wage and offering a portion of the contract when it's done). Okay, admiration out of the way...
/end rant.
I'd like to totally agree with you here on the home market. There is money to be made there, no doubt, but you reach a point where you see the plain facts... In my case, small businesses will toss me 10 hours a month at a 100/hour, without blinking an eye(in most cases). A substantial number of home users I've worked with are never satisfied, constantly bitch, and proceed to break everything you fix within days after you were there, and then expect you to come out and fix everything for free again. Despite the fact that they went and downloaded everything you told them not to and just generally do everything you tell them not to. Regardless of whether it's verbal, you leave a written list of things not to do to avoid the problem, or both(in my case, I was actually giving a small lecture, then leaving a list of things not to do, then repeating when I came back for the same fucking problem as the time previous).
Who wants to deal with that? I did, when I first started, but after you build up a reputation, start landing contracts with businesses, and discover the far less pain associated with servicing businesses, you don't want to go back. At least I don't.
Anyone want to tell me I don't have what it takes or whatever, sure, tell me that. You go help all the people I don't want to and I'll focus on the businesses. Then at the end of the year, let's compare our books to see who made more, and compare our notes to see who had to deal with more aggravation. I already know from doing this for over 4 years, that businesses are the easiest way to make money because you are given the leeway and the faith, to actually provide long lasting solutions for their problems. Home users only want to pay for bandaids and then blame you when the bandaids have to be replaced.
Screw that.
The needs and requirements of the IT industry are very different from the home and small mom and pop shops. For example big IT has a requirement for zero downtime, 24x7x365. They need to be able to run apps that are decades old, not because no one is around to reprogram them, but because they continue to work. They cannot simply have an application "stop working" because of a small system upgrade. Nor can they have applications just crash just because someother application was installed and messed up a library, etc.
To use an analogy, there are millions of cars on the road, used by everyday ordinary people, however there is a different audience which requires heavy duty trucks, and no, I'm not talking about the SUV's, but dump trucks, logging trucks, etc. There is overlap, and one will find common features, however, there are features that an ordinary person would not want or need. Same as there are features found in a small car that say a mining company would not want or need in a dump truck.
The real "problem" is when people try to cater to both audiences with a single product. While I don't mind having certain comfort features in my car, having something like cruise control in a logging truck might not really be a great idea, on the flip side, having airbrakes on a heavy truck does make sense, I wouldn't see it on a car.
The same should be true for certain types of software. The needs of an IT shop are different from the needs from a home user. An IT shop does have it's geeky crew of people who maintain it, same as a large industry probably has their own group of mechanics who repair and keep the fleet working. And yes, comming from a long IT background, some of the features found in small systems are not really wanted or desirable in an IT environment. On the flip side, as a home user, I would expect a certain amount of "just plug it in and let it go" type of a system and set of applications.