Dallas says:

Is there a reader digest version of this Andrew “Chicken-little” Horrorwitz projection?

deowll says:

I think the tech industry has a huge problem and John and Andrew have noted something today I picked up on some years back.

If your current generation hardware and software are doing what you want done the logic behind upgrading can be hard to justify especially if the economy is at all tight.

A net book running XP with a couple of gig of ram actually can run office about as well as a quad core with 9 gigs of high speed ram unless you are doing something serious relating to graphics and most graphics in spread sheets, word processing, and data bases are kind of like teats on a boar hog. Ornamental but not required.

I think that’s what really killed Vista with businesses. I waited several months to let them work the bugs out and my copy has always worked well but the upgrade to a Vista machine did nothing to improve my productivity over what it would have been if I had stayed with XP.

The upgrade to a high powered Windows 7 machine did more of the same for me though I did go to 64 bits and a quad core with 9 gig of high speed ram which offers some real advantages both in the short term and long term for some applications however I wouldn’t count MS Office as one of them.

A duel core and a couple of gigs of ram seem to be more than adequate for it. So far as I can tell a decent single core with a couple of gig of ram seems to be adequate for it.

Business stuck with XP often on old and low powered machines because they were doing everything the companies wanted them to do. They were going to gain exactly nothing if they upgraded and it was going to be a money out and time spent to upgrade.

That also explains why net books, smart phones and ipads have taken off. The hardware is lame compared to a new modest desk top but it is powerful enough to do what a lot of people want done. That being the case why not get something ultra compact and easy to transport to do what needs done?

What is true of the hardware is also true of the software to a significant degree. Just exactly how much better is MS Office 2010 over MS office 2002? Where the rubber hits the road they pretty much do the same thing with about the same amount of effort by the user. The improvements are nearly all cosmetic. Businesses are often willing to forgo cosmetic.

Last and not least MS office and similar business products; the kinds of software doctors and lawyers use for example run well on net books and low powered laptops and desktops.

The seriously heavy business apts often run on servers and low powered machines can act as front ends as well as something more powerful.

Our school system is running almost entirely on cloud based computing. Attendance, grades, assignments, nurse visits, records of discipline problems, educational software are all running on servers somewhere we aren’t one of them located outside the U.S in G.B. The tech lab no longer needs a server because the server is somewhere else.

A nice monitor is an asset along with a new mouse and keyboard so we get those but the actual computational abilities of the computers and the storage space needed on their hard drives is pretty nominal which is why we are going with refurbished machines with 3 year free replacement if they break for about $150 a pop for the actual computers.

Moore’s law may be alive and well but the average user doesn’t care because they don’t need it at least for now.