Go to law with the devil and hold court in hell
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It's time for you lot to buy PCs
THE MIGHTY VOLE has decided that it is a great time for its customers to buy stuff, and is giving dire warnings that managers should stop retrenching and start spending money again.
Of course it would say that, and no one would believe it. However to win over naysayers it found a crew of 'independent' analysts (cough!) who are glad to spout the buy-sooner-rather-than-later mantra for it.
Microsoft commissioned the bean counters at Harris Interactive who have helpfully warned that outfits that don't maintain a sufficient level of IT spending risk falling behind competitors once the economy recovers.
Harris polled 1,200 IT executives at enterprise and SMB organizations in the US, UK, Germany, and Japan.
Not surprisingly it discovered that the recession has changed the role of IT in 55 per cent of the companies surveyed. And more than 51 per cent said that budget constraints are their primary barrier to innovation. New projects are taking a back seat to just getting by, the report said.
This attitude is particularly bad in the US where outfits are spending just 29 per cent of their IT budgets on innovation.
Areas where new projects are getting funded are virtualisation, security, identity management, and cloud computing. These are coincidently exactly the places that the Vole thinks will recover most quickly when the current downturn ends and the economy at last begins to get back on track.
CRN quotes Bob Kelly, corporate vice president for Microsoft's infrastructure server marketing operation, making the argument that companies that invest in IT today and focus investment on improving efficiency rather than merely cutting costs will be setting themselves up for a faster return to growth in the future.
Of course he didn't mention that some of that healthy innovation could come from switching out expensive proprietary software products for less costly and more flexible open sauce software, thus getting the best of both approaches, but then Microsoft wouldn't. µ
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I feel sorry for the average joe who is buying a computer now with Vista. They have no idea that a better and less bloated OS is coming, and if they bought it before the June 26 (free/reduced upgrade date????) they are screwed, unless they shell out another 100-200 for Win7. Personally I am going to just buy Win7 OEM for desktop and laptop but not upgrade any hardware due to limited funds.
This is being written on my Win 2000 computer, but right next to it, I'm installing Windows XP on my shiny new i920 rig. A bit more resource hungry, but overall it looks like a decent system that XP. I did research before the decision and apparently huge numbers of people use it and are happy. So it indeed looks like a worthy upgrade to me.
"outfits that don't maintain a sufficient level of IT spending risk falling behind competitors once the economy recovers"
But of course, in order to be successful all any company has to do is buy IT stuff ! Maximizing what you have, streamlining processes and improving production margins are all useless endeavors, just buy Win 7 and all will magically go well !
"But for those who have a quad core and 4gb+ ram.. what incentive is there to upgrade ??"
Very little. Care to speculate on what percentage of business users have that kind of hardware under their desks? I would guess a large fraction are still on single core machines, with integrated graphics circa 2002-2003.
There's no really pressing reason to buy new computers when the existing ones work just fine. Unlike home machines most work systems normally do just a few tasks, the same thing that they were doing 10 years ago.
From a purely practical perspective running modern versions of Windows is both expensive and risky -- expensive because of the licensing and risky because you just don't know what's not going to work with what.
Microsoft's "warning" is probably for those backwards losers who get up in arms over the fact that Vista/Win 7 won't run perfectly on their old 2001 computers. It's a mindset that transcends OSes, and becomes a type of zealotry.
Of course, they won't switch over to Linux as an alternative since that would be to great a changeover. I would also not be surprised if they still use Netscape 4.7 or IE6 to maintain "legacy" support.
It's time to move on people. You can get a very nice computer for so cheap these days, and it's amazing computer hardware companies even make a profit. Even Atom-based machines are capable enough to run Windows 7 and nice versions of Linux. It doesn't have to be Windows.
No need to upgrade right now..
well DX11 will be some incentive for upgrading the video card.
But for those who have a quad core and 4gb+ ram.. what incentive is there to upgrade ??
Release some new 6, 8-core designs.. without calling them server cpus. then perhaps there will be enough performance difference to make any notable difference.. atleast in DX11 games wich will support multi-core.
Of course no one is buying PC's. With all the Windows 7 press out there I would think a lot of people are holding off until they can get a pc with windows 7 on it. And don't suggest upgrading from Vista when Win 7 releases. No one does that... we are all smart enough to reinstall it from scratch and if you don't have the skills to do that, you wait to buy it until its already on the PC you want to buy, hence the poor sales.
The worlwide economic meltdown is a long ways from bottomed. Microsucks might as well get use to the cold new world, most of which doesn't need nor want Microsucks products.
Sounds like MS is getting desperate to offload them truckloads of Vista copies in the warehouse. LoL...
IMHO. If the system you have,
1) Works.
2) Does everything you need it to.
3) Does it well.
Why replace it. IT gear is a major expense for any company. MS and the industry on a whole needs to realize that a company isn't going to spend top dollar on a high end system just so the OS runs correctly when all they need is an old P-III that can manage to run Win-XP and Office-97... LoL...
IMHO, Vista is a bloated joke... Win-7 is a step up from XP for HOME USERS. But another resource intensive (Probably pricey) expense that won't add any additional usability for businesses.
I guess what I'm rambling on about.. If it ain't broke to the point of not being repairable... Why replace it?
Heck, for the price of the hardware and MS operating system/software, MS best stop whining before companies realize that they can employ a couple linux gurus, save bucketloads of cash on most of the software they'd need to run (most winblows software has a GPL'd "donation-ware" linux alternative that in some cases works better). Training curve for the employees is now next to nil for some Linux distros, cause your average user doesn't need to know how to manage the system just how to find the program launcher on the desktop.
As long as I have both hands and BitTorrent .. no need to buy a PC or Win.
As for Dog Logs post: if MS didn't push out hungrier OS why would people upgrade?
Only ppl who need faster PCs are Gamers. Poss gfx design but thats it .. like 5% of PC sales are sold to these....
... the rest is all down to MS.
And any self-respecting gamer should be building their own which only leaves the noobs and workers.
My work computer only got upgraded to XP about a month or two ago.
I personally would prefer Linux. Ended up using Gimp because IT couldn't find the old copy of Photoshop. And it's all good.
If it stops, I'll just have the helpful IT guys wipe the disk and reinstall XP.
No one here sees a need for Win7 yet. Or Vista, for that matter.
IT used to replace our laptops on a 2-year cycle. I always told them there was no need. Looks like they may have discovered a way to save a good bit of money by stretching out the replacement period.
My company doesn't use or need MS - we save a small fortune by not using their software. We do silly things like send orders in XML or JSON format to others that can go straight into their computer systems. Our so called competitors send pretty documents that need the recipient company to employ expensive humans to print out and read these documents and then type them into their computer systems. We're scared!
Its nice to have the ability to create documents for our more primitive customers but we only do it because they've been badly ripped off salespeople - and have lots of MS but no computing.
maybe more people would purchase PCs if the vole stopped forcing buyers to have a useless, annoying and highly resource demanding operating system.
people with half a brain or more assemble their own from components anyway