Re: Computers

["B. Esser" <besser@marian.creighton.edu>]

On Tue, 25 Feb 1997, John D. Sample wrote:

> It is certainly true that you can get more for less $ in the PC world, but
> I've never seen training costs or tech support costs considered.
This is really an apple and oranges comparison (forgive the pun).  A
recent issue of BYTE magazine tried to compare platforms using real world
examples and saw little correlation between advertised processor speed,
bus speed etc and performance.

> When choosing a computer for the workplace I think many businesses take a
> similar attitude.  They ignore the hours of lost productivity due to
> training, equipment set up, and malfunctions.  That's not to say manpower
> costs are enough to swing the decision one way or another, it's just that
> they aren't considered.
As someone who ran a 200 person technical shop for many years and sold
"solutions" to the vertical market of yellow pages publishing there is
another consideration.  When we sold into a technically non savvy shop we
always pushed the wintel solution.  We could sell the hardware and
software for cost knowing that the support contract would more than make
up for lack of initial profit.  
Internally we used a combination of Sun workstations and Mac's because we
wanted to maximize our own productivity.