Text 15324, 80 rader
Skriven 2007-01-11 17:59:18 av mike (1:379/45)
Ärende: The Second Time Around
==============================
From: mike <mike@barkto.com>


http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2070934,00.asp

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Opinion: First-timers and upgrading buyers have different concerns.


Have you ever seen one of those bumper stickers that says, "The worst day
fishing is better than the best day working"? That's how I feel when I look at
today's PCs. The worst PC you can buy today is a great piece of gear, better
than what you could buy at any price not long ago.

The value proposition of new machines is getting many people interested in
upgrades—but the industry still treats PC buyers as first-time customers,
failing to lower key barriers to an upgrade purchase.

The prices of new systems are astonishing. On Dell's site, for example, I find
for less than $500 a machine with a 2GHz CPU with 256K cache, 512MB of RAM, an
80GB hard drive and a CD-burning/DVD-playing optical drive, plus a 15-inch
flat-panel display. If I'd put up with the weight, bulk and heat of a 17-inch
CRT, I could knock off another $100.

What I'd get is a whole lot more than most people need for Internet, e-mail,
digital photos, and most school or work tasks done at home. The problem is that
retail channels, even direct Internet sales, can't make any money selling (and,
crucially, supporting) a machine that costs much less.

If you want the media capabilities of a current entry-level machine, your older
system may seem pretty lame. There are plenty of people who'd be happy to have
it, though, and who might reincarnate it for a second life of useful work at
essentially zero cost.

As I was writing this column, in fact, I got an e-mail from a reader replying
to my column of last week on Microsoft's Windows Vista. He had purchased a
Pentium III machine for $50, installed Ubuntu Linux in a process that he
described as "smoother than any version of Windows I've ever used" and wound up
with a machine that he now finds quite worth having around.

In an eWEEK Labs TestRun roundtable podcast on Vista late last month, I
recalled a comment that someone made in the late 1980s about OS/2: "If we'd
known that the successor to DOS would take two years to deliver, wouldn't
multitask old applications well, and would require us to buy new applications
with a new look and feel, we could have just adopted desktop Unix and gotten
there a whole lot sooner."

With its potential for application breakage in nonadministrator accounts, its
new look in core applications such as Microsoft's Office 2007 and its need for
costly hardware to show off its most visible differences from previous Windows
versions, it seems as if Vista might inspire similar thoughts—and now, desktop
Unix options are cheap and easy. The phrase "tipping point" comes to mind.

Meanwhile, with people pulling out their credit cards for holiday shopping, I'm
getting a lot of questions from friends about what they should consider as an
upgrade and how they should go about upgrading from what they're currently
using—because few people are buying a first-ever machine. It seems to me a
sadly missed opportunity when vendors sell PCs in a way that reflects a
conception of all customers as first-time PC buyers.

People ask me how they'll get their old work files moved across to a new
machine. They want to know if they'll need to buy new applications software.
They want to know if new versions of their current applications will correctly
handle work product files created with older versions that they've been using.

They want to know if buying a Macintosh is a realistic option for someone who's
been using Windows for several years. PC configurations and PC selling
processes should directly address these questions.

What would it cost, for example, to include a back-panel connector on a new PC
and a cable—something that would let anyone who can use a screwdriver take the
hard drive out of an old machine and transfer files to a new one? If I were a
brick-and-mortar seller of PCs, I guarantee you that I'd be seeking to
differentiate myself from mail-order sellers by offering migration assistance.
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  /m

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