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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.
"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.
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.)
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).