Slashdot Mirror
The IT Industry's Red Shift Theory
Stony Stevenson writes "Sun Microsystems' CTO, Greg Papadopoulos has come out with a Red Shift Theory for IT which posits that an 'elite group of companies are consuming inordinate amounts of IT infrastructure, well beyond most other businesses, and that their demand is growing exponentially. This trend, Papadopoulos maintains, has implications not just for IT's most insatiable consumers, but for the structure of the computing industry itself. It's not just about how many CPU cycles a company uses. Papadopoulos argues that red-shift companies will enjoy exponential business growth in the coming years. Blue-shift companies — those whose processing needs aren't exploding — will grow at about the same rate as GDP, he says.'"
A hardware company says that buying more hardware is a good thing for your company. News at eleven.
(Yawn).
Qxe4
Do the "red-shift" companies employ a "blue ocean strategy"? :-)
[Insert pithy quote here]
OMG! WTF! They're turning communist!
it must be true. Why else would they allude to a phenomenon of cosmic proportion to describe a simple "growth equals growth" observation?
One shift two shift, red shift blue shift?
A-Bomb
The problem then is that red giants end up as white dwarfs, and no-one will do business with a dwarf!
But they used the Doppler effect to explain it, surely that little scientific reference counts for something?
Get out of town...
It's true, innovation takes a fair amount of software development (if that's what you're building). If you're doing accounting systems for state governments, your revenue will grow more slowly, unless you add a new state or something.
Of course, out in the real world, there's more than IT - corning has been growing fairly fast over the past 5 years, and they seem to have done it with carbon filters.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Every week, yet another IT business-man / manager /columnist which fondly remembers the Internet Bubble comes up with yet another theory on how IT/Internet/Networking is causing/will cause an infinite boom of growth and properity and those which do not jump onto the train of [fill in something he's trying to sell] will be left behind in the dust.
I thought the Bursting of the Bubble had cured people of falling for this kind of arguments (which were used over and over again during the Bubble to justify insane valuations for companies which never made a cent).
Guess the leeches didn't gave up on trying to suck the fools dry yet.
This is backwards. Companies which are buying hardware are buying hardware because they already have a successful business model (or one they expect to be successful). The differentiator between successful and unsuccessful companies isn't how much hardware they buy, it's the viability of their business plan/product.
'Sun Microsystems' CTO, Greg Papadopoulos has come out with a Red Shirt Theory for IT which posits that an 'elite group of aliens are consuming inordinate amounts of ST infrastructure, well beyond most other aliens, and that their murders are growing exponentially. This trend, Papadopoulos maintains, has implications not just for ST's most insatiable consumers, but for the structure of the space industry itself. It's not just about how many warp cycles a company uses. Papadopoulos argues that red-shirt companies will enjoy exponential deaths in the coming years. Blue-shirt companies -- those whose heads aren't exploding -- will live at about the same rate as GDP, he says.
He's saying that companies which are growing quickly are growing quickly.
Red shift? Blue shift? What do you do when it goes plaid?
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
"Sir, we need to upgrade our infastructure..."
"Why is that, Jenkins?"
"According to a new report, our profitability is directly related to our processing needs, sir."
"Well, I'm not seeing how our needs have increased enough to go over our yearly budget for hardware, Jenkins."
"Sir, having extra processing power will increase our productivity..."
"How's that, Jenkins?"
"Porn."
"Make it so, Number One."
Don't be harsh. Proactively leveraging six sigma synergies in a blue-red shift discontinuously changing ecosystem leads to a re-efficiently contracting contingency workforce paradigm tending toward the rightsize.
Only a fool would ignore the gainshare effect of empowerment strategies that insourced intellectual capital reallocation due to lean Kaizen open door management obviously creates. The mosaic effects of capital market global forward-trends account for fully 4 points share of Sun's complex-component earnings per diluted ownerstake last quarter.
With two new colors to work with, things can only improve.Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
I no expert on this One Shift Two Shift Red Shift Blue Shift business, but where exactly is the author standing that the GDP is approaching him, and how many terahertz is the IT industry is oscillating at?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
And the rate of expansion seems to be increasing from the little-understood Dark Capitalism.
I hear Microsoft is making a lot of money, too.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
...so Sun will invent RSOD.
Table-ized A.I.
The more digital consumer babeling and viewing gets the more processsing power you need to process it.
A lot of the shift is from a transmission media that didn't need a lot of processing power to one that does.
Where the amount of media consumers access is growing at a rate less than that.
Where is the difference in the eyes of the consumer... their wallet mostly.
But we have more choices now and a greater level of convenience. IS it worth it?
They are using slashdot to test marketing. Now how they score articles on wether it gets more or less vitriol from us slashdotters is up for debate.
Remember, Marketing, or advertising targets only the week-minded, sane strong willed people will do it themselves.
1) Some people buy more fast computers than other people.
2) Like, a *lot* more.
3) These have to be bloody *fast* computers, if they're causing Doppler shifts.
Ok actually let's not. Let's play a little imagination game.
/. reader, to fix my broken visualization of his analogy. If you can't, I have to say to Popdopopdoloslous, you have lost me.
Picture the whole of IT companies and companies that use IT as a spherical microcosm. The normal physical dimensions in this microcosm are instead dimensions of economy, scale, and technology. Like our universe is puportedly doing, this sphere is expanding. Now, because he claims these "elite" companies are basically exponentially distancing themselves from the other companies, they could arguably be on the extents of the expanding sphere. Although there are fewer of these companies they require much more of our microcosmic IT space. Fair enough. Moving away from us, and red shifted from our perspective in the exact center of the sphere.
So far, so good I guess. Then we have blue-shifted companies. In this microcosm, in order to become blue-shifted to my perspective, you'd have to be heading away from using more advanced technology and also using less of it. Frankly, I can't come up with a single company in the world that's doing that and is successful. If you don't look at in on a time-scale of a year or two, but rather of fifty, one hundred or even five hundred years, it's pretty damn clear that every single company is red-shifted from the perspective of an individual in the center of the microcosmic sphere.
End game.
So I put it to you,
TLF
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
The notion of utility computing, of course, has been around since the IBM mainframe. What's new is not just an explosion in demand from companies with mountains of data to climb
...Referring again to the power grid, Papadopoulos uses the analogy of a massive, very hot power plant that produces multiple megawatts of energy versus an array of portable Honda generators....But the jury is still out on whether the big iron from Sun will win out over arrays of dozens or hundreds of commodity boxes. "We'll see [an exponential] increase in the number of servers sold, yes," says technology pundit Mark Anderson, author of the Strategic News Service newsletter. "Will they be Sun servers, running Solaris? I'm not so sure. Everything is headed toward open systems, mostly Linux on commodity servers."
Not really. Data chomping has always been a desire. It just used to not be cost-effective. People indeed did think that IBM would sell bigger and bigger chunks of plug-and-play processing. However, minicomputers and microcomputers ruined that goal. It appears to go in cycles where centralization ebbs and flows as new technologies and tech fads come and go, changing the dynamic.
This is exactly what the mainframe-centric model proposed. In a way, it is what economic communism claimed: that centralization factors out wasteful duplication, and allows economies of scale. However, reality has shown that to be messier and more difficult than it looks on paper.
One of the counter factors is that it is often easier to do massive data chomping on a desktop PC. For example, Oracle servers are almost always overburdened and therefore slow, so that people tend to download raw data to MS-Access and similar tools and process it themselves faster. If the Oracle DBA's pumped up the power of the Oracle servers, then people would use up all the extra power pretty quick. it's like building freeways: the more you build the more houses are built. Traffic bottlenecks are what limits many cities from growing further.
Similarly, if one manages their own processing (via MS-Access-like tools), then they manage their resources more efficiently. The Oracle DBA cannot really be the one who decides who is wasting resources or not because they cannot keep their head in everybody's business needs to see if they really need an 8-way join for an odd marketing report, etc. Localization thus polices resources better since one is competing against themselves (their own desktop or local department/office servers).
Table-ized A.I.
Exponential growth for a business isn't even possible, unless maybe you start out really, really small, and for a short amount of time.
Exponential business growth is not possible simply because the number of customers is finite. Even if you make something that all 6 billion people will buy, you're still not going to be able to maintain exponential growth very long before everybody is a customer.
paintball
Contrary to what this theory says, computing power has no value in itself. I can think of no scenario where one company wins over by simply 'outcomputing' competition. It may be that global companies with a versatile infrastructure and the neccesary computing power to control it may have a competitive advantage - but that's just like saying Coca Cola has a competitive advantage over Bobs Village Brewery. Killer App Software are built by small teams of knowlegeable people on affordable hardware with relatively standard processing power. And however well that scales is mostly dependant on having the right people with the right knowledge in key IT decision-making positions (rather than having a higher cap on the IT budget). A thing more unlikely to happen in larger companies.
I actually would think it's the other way, with large operations wasting huge amounts of CPU cycles because of bizar IT-business decisions and thus requiring more of it per dollar of turnover than smaller companies. A prime example that play in the same direction for this is the developement of the telecom market in Germany in the last few years. Within just a few years all companies have gone from wide ranges of Über-complex billing rates and tarif models to simple phone flatrates. This trend was started by new kids on the block like Arcor who quickly figured that the billing infrastructure would be far to expensive to compensate for the potential gain in income it would provide. So they introduced phone flatrates which are by orders of magnatude simpler to bill and process. And others followed suit.
Bottom line: The theory sounds interesting, but I don't think it sticks. If it does, then only under special isolated circumstances.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Since those companies that are growing more slowly are still growing the same direction as the "red shift" companies, there is no blue shift, just different shades of red. This is not a very good analogy.
A much better one would equate companies with countries, and growth with energy useage. There's one company that's the US, growing/using much more per capita (per dollar) than the others. There's a few that are growing/using somewhat less, but in the same order of magnitude. There are more and more as you go to the low end of the list, with many not growing much more than the GDP (equivalent to using only their own energy production).
Of course no CEO wants his company equated to something that squanders resources and dumps crap into the environment in the process. No sense of humor.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Well...the sphere is expanding...so...in general everything is getting closer to the edge...meaning on average everything is using technology...soo...they'd blue-shift if they're adopting less technology than average? Maybe the vantage point isn't the center but, say, 20% of the total distance out? Does that make any sense to you? 'cause it doesn't make much to me either......
I cannot seem to understand why people cannot see this flaw as easily as I do. Success of a company is often measured by its growth rate and indeed by its rate of increase on the growth rate (acceleration). There is a limit for EVERY market. There is a saturation point for every market. And when the health of a company is measured not by its stability or state in the market place but by "growth and acceleration" I have to wonder what drives the mentality that it's actually a good idea outside of what it does for those who buy and sell stocks on the market. (So yes, that's exactly what it's all about... duh)
So when did we all lose sight of what is good for a company? Matters like quality and customer satisfaction are no longer a consideration? And every time I hear "this company is buying that company" or "we're on a growth surge" or some other such nonsense, I have to wonder why anyone would think this sort of institutional business instability is a good idea for anyone except those who play the stock market?
Will we have to suffer another great depression before people realize that the cause of so many of our business, labor and national monetary health problems are rooted deeply in the short-sighted notion that whatever a business does it should be as a means to provide value for shareholders? I think the answer is yes because short of a disaster, people will have little motivation to see where this all leads and turn around before it's too late. And unfortunately, while one person might catch a glimpse of the future and become more sane, the people who are still insane will consume him as a means of satisfying their growth strategy. I get the mental image of a bunch of cannibals strategizing their own growth and acceleration success plans in how to consume their environment. The logic is rather unsettling to me.
So my infinite-loop application which requires gigabytes of RAM and disk space will create profits for me even if it produces nothing? That doesn't seem right.
There is no correlation between IT spending and productivity or profitability.
This is the same old saw that hardware firms used in the 1980s-1990s. Gartner used to say you should spend on IT as a proportion of your revenue.
But numerous studies, based on publicly available data, debunk that view as bullshit.
It's not that IT is bad -- it's just that you have to blame or praise management for the proper application of it. Which is just another way of saying "you can't spend your way through problems without thought".
NOW, there's a valid argument here, but it's a lot more subtle than the bylines. One has to dig into Papadopoulos' quotes to get the jist of this as: "you should have the management insight to take advantage of the inherent cost savings that are due to Moore's law." This has been hampered for decades due to inflexibility with the software -- something that virtualization and utility computing is seeking to fix, and an area that Sun wants to compete in. Indeed, this is a big deal.
But it doesn't mean your computing needs will skyrocket, unless your management has an insightful, productive application for all of that power. Google does (selling advertisements along side day-to-day networked computing needs), but I'm not sure the rest of the Fortune 500 has turned to apply that level of creativity to their situation.
-Stu
... HERE is why:
They all exist at a level of assumption. They assume that "someone" will be available to implement their lofty ideas, when they themselves have not the technical capability to do so: They do not have the skills or knowledge needed, you see.
But, they get paid a LOT more, than those of us that DO - why is that?
Hell, I deal with programmers, engineers, every day - and many of them are as clueless as the best of the 900K+ UID Slashdotters here (Hell, it's possible/probable that many of them ARE the same - THAT would explain a lot).
But, they all seem to think that since they've managed to create a "perfect" network, at home - that they are qualified to criticize the design and implementation of a network that spans the globe, and encompasses ten thousand plus nodes.
Only, they aren't, you see.
If any one of them got called out, at, say, 3:00 AM EST, for a major network failure, and had to fix it, because it was their job, they'd shit their pants.
Let's try: "Company X says that buying lots of company X products will cause your business to grow at an exponential rate".
Aha! Now I see - it's just more marketing doublespeak. I wonder if you could get Sun to put these claims in writing?
Sure qualifies as a 'lightning-bolt insight' in my book. It's going to change the face of IT forever!
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
What kind of stupid metaphor is that? Red shift means that they are moving away from the observer fast, blue shift means that they are moving towards the observer fast.
As for the "theory", mainly what you're seeing is that fast growing companies buy a lot more hardware; they do that for two reasons: (1) they are adding customers and (2) they don't have time to tune their software, so they are using disproportionate amounts of resources. But the cause is fast growth, and buying lots of hardware is the effect.
Oh, one thing that's pretty clear: many of those companies are not buying Sun products. Why would they?
1. Start a business
2. Open a no-fee savings account and deposit at least $10
3. Presto, your business is now growing exponentially!
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
dwarves
That must be why he throws the chair!
:-)
With apologies to Dr. Suess.
There are, at minimum, some companies which need massive amounts of computation, which needs to scale not just with their markets, but with their product development - where their edge largely consists in finding useful things to do with massive amounts of computation before their competition scoops them on whatever the next idea to take off will be.
Yes, in an arms race you often end up with in the silly spot of "But what do we need 10,000 nukes for." Well, what you need 'em for, if you want to be the only superpower on your globe, is to hopefully make the competition quit before they begin to seriously challenge you. Eh, bad analogy. The point is, in this "arms race" the "nukes" also contribute essentially to your products. And the people building your nukes had better be fully aware of the degree of your need, and competitive with the other armorers.
Sun, first in fusion.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I would have thought the GDP was exponential since money tends to breed more money.
Even if it wasn't, wouldn't the presence of exponentially growing companies force the GDP to go exponential after a while. Maybe such companies will quickly die before they get big enough to do that, but a bad business strategy that leads to a quick death sounds like a bad business strategy (modulo the Enrons and SCOs of the world).
Sounds like a lot of things coming out of the Democratic Party and their underlings....like the USA is using "too much" of the sunlight? That was just a week or two ago.
Sheesh...well, "Divide and conquer".
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Are they growing? Fast?
brown shift theory, where any and all overblown theories about the interwebs invariably approach utter bullshit at an increasing rate.
Not exactly. Most financial measures of growth are compounded measures, which are exponential functions. For example, compound interest of 5% gives exponential growth of 1.05^n, where n is the number of compounding periods. When economists say that the GDP is growing at 3% or that an investment is giving an annual rate of return of 10%, those are (averaged) exponential growth rates.
You're neglecting two factors that contribute to long-term growth: inflation and productivity. Inflation is false growth, because it mainly reflects the amount by which the growth of the money supply (including credit) increases faster than the over all economy (supply of funds growing faster than the demand). People can charge $150 instead of $120, but the profit margins remain constant, because the suppliers charge more too. This is distinguished from price increases based on supply and demand of the product itself, or due to speculation.
Productivity is "real" growth because it reflects the ability to produce more goods from the same resources. Again productivity is measured as a percentage increase, which tranlsates to exponential growth when averaged over time.
We are the 198 proof..
Heh. Except it's Sun's CTO and he doesn't actually say that. What he says is, "companies who buy lots and lots of expensive hardware will experience spectacular growth, while those who don't buy our crap will be left behind!"
Which doesn't even make sense as "growth equals growth", since not everyone is a software company. E.g., for a car manufacturer or someone like Nike or Coca Cola, exactly how does overspending on IT translate into faster growth? While _some_ benefits do exist, and I've seen them first hand, the factor is fairly small and that growth-because-of-IT is essentially capped. In the end as a manufacturing company you live or die by your marketing and your product quality (sadly, in that order), not by how Web 2.0 your site is.
E.g., sure, you can save some money by moving to an online relationship with your suppliers, but even then:
1. You need to be a certain size where you can actually apply some volume and pressure to negotiating discounts, because otherwise everyone will just direct you to their list price, online or not. And at that size, exponential growth pretty much stopped anyway.
2. It only goes so far. You might be able to squeeze a few more bucks out of the suppliers by making them compete with each other online, but there's a limit even to that. They won't go into negative profits just for you. (And if they did, they'll go out of that market soon.) So at some point you're pretty much capped there, everyone started doing the same thing too, and adding more expensive servers won't help any more.
3. Doubly so because suppliers of big companies are a bit of an exclusive club. You can push prices down only so much, before it comes at the expense of quality, and that you really don't want to drop too much. So before (and after) accepting someone in such an online process, there'll be a lot of checking if they can supply the quality you want, the quantities they need, if they have anything to lose (suing them for damages won't do much if they're broke), if they have a reasonable reputation, etc.
4. For the same reason as above, you're not saving that much manpower and other such costs. Plus, in addition to the above, a lot of deals will still be done in person or on the golf course. (E.g., don't think Dell negotiates its discounts from Intel by just pointing them at a reverse auction URL.) Buying a big expensive server doesn't actually mean you can fire half the buyers and let the software do everything for you from now on.
5. Some of the deals are just too much of a pain to squeeze in the inherently OCD structure of a computer program. E.g., sure, you could code things so flexibly that you leave room for such stuff as "we'll get a big discount on component B if we get component A only from these guys" or "we'll get a discount from Intel if we _don't_ deal with AMD" or whatnot. But it's a pain in the rear, and chances are you won't foresee everything. Humans are flexible and creative, computers aren't. Sometimes trying to squeeze everything into the same rigid one-size-fits-all algorithm, is just a high-tech way to commit seppuku.
Etc.
And the same, or similar, applies to other aspects you could put online or on the intranet too.
Plus some extras. E.g., if you put your sales online, not everyone is Dell. Some products just aren't bought primarily online. I don't think many people buy their soda online, so Coca Cola won't see much benefit there.
Plus, as the final counter-example, see the dot-com bubble. There were _plenty_ of people eager to be the corporate equivalent of the dumbest consumerist. People who just got their money out of nowhere, and proceeded to blow it on things that were little more than status symbols: over-sized servers, fast cars, impressive buildings, 10 times the employees they actually needed (especially programmers and IT), etc. By his red-shift theory, those should be today's new Microsoft. In reality, the vast majority just went bankrupt. 'Nuff said.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Well, that's insightful in its own way, but you have to remember that bubbles are caused slightly differently.
Bubbles are based on greed. Pure, distilled, unadulterated greed. At some point the prospect of making lots of undeserved money, is causing people's brains to switch to the wishful thinking that some greater dope will take the fall. People keep dumping money into a bubble precisely _because_ it's a bubble and keeps expanding, so any bubble-goods (shares, tulip bulbs, etc) you buy now, can hopefully be sold more expensive later.
The Dutch tulip craze, for example, was based on the idea that if you buy a tulip bulb for 100 guldens (a huge sum at the time), some other idiot will later buy it from you for 1000 (a king's ransom.)
The dot-com bubble, for example was a 1-2 punch of greed:
1. The idea that you can defraud the advertisers for as much money as you want to. Advertising rates were originally calculated for sites with exactly 1 banner on the front page, and it tended to be relevant too, so people actually clicked on it. Then someone came with the idea that you can make sites with wall-to-wall banners and the advertisers will pay you hundreds of thousands per month for just having a homepage. And surely the advertisers won't catch on. (And when advertisers were slow to react, some waiting to see if more ads actually mean more clicks and sales, it just "confirmed" the idea that it's free money for anyone who wants to take them.)
A lot of companies were bought for a lot of money or made huge profits, apparently for no other reason than having a web server with lots of ads. Others were bought for other reasons, such as actually having a service and a share of the users that someone else was willing to subsidize as part of their empire (e.g., ICQ or Hotmail), but it fit in the same general picture: make a high-tech company, get bought for hundreds of millions.
This helped "bootstrap" the bubble.
2. As I was saying before, it kept going precisely _because_ it was a bubble. A lot of companies were formed not because they believed there was a valid business plan in just having an "I love cats" web page, but to get a lot of money in an IPO. (I actually worked for a company whose _sole_ business plan was "we'll have an IPO and people will give us hundreds of millions!") And a lot of VCs invested in those companies, not because they genuinely believed that they'll work great in the long term, but because they hoped they can wait until right before they peak, and sell every share before it crashes and burned. And stock advisors were known to even directly manipulate that mechanism, e.g., by advising people to buy the shares of some imploding dot-com just as they were selling their shares in it.
Even the absurd unsustainable structure of a dot-com in that bubble wasn't genuine stupidity in most cases, but deliberately trying to have the same image as the dot-coms that got millions in IPO before or got bought. If the ones that peaked sky high before consisted of hundreds of programmers and tens of millions of dollars worth of servers just for a web site that sold nothing, the new ones tried to look exactly the same. It was a "pick me" marker, if you will, rather than just believing that lots of expensive hardware equals growth.
At one point, some even lost sight of the goal to get and retain lots of users, which was (A) the original way to get lots of advertising money, and (B) later the dot-com bubble's excuse: "see, we'll get millions of users first, and sometime later actually figure out a way to sell them stuff." (E.g., the dot-com I worked for, had such memorable management quotes as, "no, we don't want a forum, we don't want users to post all sorts of crap on our servers" and "no, chatrooms are just for cybersex and other crap, we don't need one" and so on for all the proposed ways to g
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ GDP_(real)_growth_rate
all the numbers listed in that wikipedia page are the k in the exponential differential equation dx/dy = ky.
Tolkien created the spellings 'elves' and 'dwarves' instead of elfs and dwarfs. Elves and Dwarves are the typical spelling if you're talking about humanoids in Fantasy, while elfs (for talking about old fairy tales) and dwarfs (for talking about short humans) remains the proper spelling in those contexts. So the grandparent is saying "Humans with dwarfism get the short end of the stick" as opposed to "Humanoids living in Ironforge get the short end of the stick"
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
... with Mr. Papadopoulos as the Pointy-Haired Boss[tm].
It's Linux, damnit! Pay no attention to renaming attempts by self-aggrandizing blowhards.
Oil companies grew exponentially for awhile...then levelled off. Then cars were invented and they grew exponentially again...then levelled off.
Car companies grew exponentially...then levelled off.
Every new thing grows like this, then levels off to more or less population growth. (With new smaller exponential growths as new markets, e.g. China, open up...)
Computers, software, etc. are just more of the same. But we've only been at it, large-scale, for 25 years. 25 years after Ford started, you could still get into cars pretty easily. 25 years after oil, mass-produced cars hadn't even been invented yet.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I was recently approached by a neighbor who run a small mid-term rental company, meaning that they rent things for 1-30 weeks). His business is growing and he is having a hard time tracking and billing for all his assets. He thinks a little computer program could really bail him out of his grwoing problems. According to sun, his business will be saved if he buys some hardware.
I don't think hardware or software will save his business. He needs to hire someone who can manage his assets. They could write every asset on its own 3x5 card and record a rental on each line of the card. Every week, they just go through each 3x5 and generate their billings.
I personally would use software, but if you can't think of how to do it with pencil and paper, you have a problem that is more fundamental to your business than the software can solve.
'Elves' was the old way of spelling it, and it appears that other authors used it when referring to the Norse Elves (as opposed to the small winged elfs).
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.