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What a Vista Upgrade Will Really Cost You
narramissic writes, "James Gaskin wrote an interesting article this week about what he recons it will really cost organizations to upgrade to Vista. Gaskin estimates that each Vista user will 'cost your company between $3,250 and $5,000. That's each and every Vista user. Money will go to Microsoft for Vista and Office 2007, to hardware vendors for new PCs and components, and possibly a few bucks to Apple for those users jumping to a Mac.'" Any sense of how realistic those figures are?
Of my company (~80K employees) about 2/3 have IBM/Lenovo notebooks. The other 1/3 are dell notebooks or desktops. A rolling three year window is used to determine upgrades, and yes it's required. When the dot bomb happened and we pushed to a 4 year cycle support costs in that last year were dramatically higher than the other years. The knee in the curve appeared to happen at 3 years 3 months (quaterly mapping).
If your department/company is on desktops then the upgrade costs for a rollout will be minimal anyway as a vista PC will likely only be a couple hundred more than a bottom end XP box from dell, and I'm sure the entire optiplex line will be Vista compatible.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Aero is not required on corporate PCs so scratch the video upgrade. We deployed Windows XP with the dummied-down Windows 2000 interface and expect to do the same with Vista. We do allow users to change to the Fisher-Price UI if they like, though.
Corporate customers don't pay between $750 and $1k for Office - our enterprise licensing for Microsoft products (which includes the OS, Office Professional and Server and Exchange CALs) runs about $200 per PC per year.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
Hardware warranty on parts, one hour labor on parts replacement. Most business clients agree with my recomendations to purchase additional necessaries (i.e. on hand replacement of HD and DVD). In the event of HD failure, a replacement is on hand and the failed unit is then sent back for warranty replacement.
As I'm in a relatively small town, with a shop on Main St (literally), most of my business clients are within a 5 minute walk. And as such, if a business client needs me now. I place an "out of the shop for an hour" sign on the door and am at their disposal.
To answer the question above parent about undercutting Dell not being worth it:
It's funny. Everyone talks about how business need to evolve to make the required changes to compete. In my situation, it's actually very easy.
I don't sell computers. I sell a service. When a client comes in for a consultation with me, we sit down and map out their needs. I provide the client with a selection of hardware choices and include my recomendation. Once components have been selected, I provide the client with either Newegg or Tigerdirect ordering numbers (in the case of Newegg, I offer to setup a preliminary client account w/o financials, and fill their cart). The client actually orders their own parts and I assemble and provide a one year (hardware) service warranty on each assembled system.
My billing is very simple that way -- I don't handle inventory, so there's no taxable sales. I provide service only and charge flat rate service fees that are set as to complexity and provide scalable discount for quantity. i.e. Workstation builds are $150 a pop. More than three builds gives a 10% discount, five builds - 15%.
I sketched the initial idea and handed it to my accountant for refinement. I now have a very simple business model that is beginning (after two years) to show some real stability.
The majority of my PC business is walk in cleaning jobs and reinstalls for Mom and Dad. Occasionally I get to build cool stuff (high end gaming rigs and HTPC's), I've got 8 systems on the floor for closed LAN party gaming, a 12'x 10' chromakey green screen for novelty digital photo's, and now we're branching out to cover novelty karaoke recording and mobile garage band and gig recording on the weekends.
So, again, when asked how it's worth competing with Dell... because I don't try and rape each client for every last dollar they have. I offer advice and reasonable service charges.
Fortunately, my wife and I own our home. We have no children (or plans for them) and, generally value our friends, and peace of mind more than keeping up with the Jones family.
Also -- we try and incorporate our own personal interests into our business (I'm a musician, therefore: recording, she's an artist and photographer: so, greenscreen photography. We both like gaming - so, closed LAN parties on Saturday nights).
The last part sounds a bit preachy, sorry. But after the article yesterday on dwindling IT jobs in the country (and a few very solid reader comments about hardware support and instllation), I just felt verbiage heavy.
It's easy to compete, when you don't. Use the current market as an advantage and wipe away your inventory. If you don't have the pockets to compete with Walmart, Circuit City or CompUSA... don't. Use online sellers to your advantage and build off their lower prices.
Works for me.
#SickNotWeak