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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.
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.
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.
"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
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.
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.)
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
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).
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).
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