Salesforce banks savings by sweating tech infrastructure for an extra year CRM giant Salesforce has decided to sweat its infrastructure for an extra year, and make employees wait the same period before giving them new PCs. News of the company's decision to live with old tech came in the SaaS supremo's Q4 2023 earnings call, during which CFO Amy Weaver told investors "Our guidance includes slightly …
So that's supposed to be a problem ?
This is just what has been waiting to happen for a decade. Four-year-old PCs ? Gosh, what an infamy ! Employees should benefit from a 2% performance increase every 3 years, not 4 !
Come on, a PC in a business environment can work 6 years just fine. Managers will just have to put up with not getting the latest and greatest to surf porn with on the job.
Honestly, I'm surprised that they're working the servers longer than the PCs. I don't care how important you think you are, but the server you work on is doing more than your PC is.
Come on, a PC in a business environment can work 6 years just fine. Managers will just have to put up with not getting the latest and greatest to surf porn with on the job.
At my current place of work, once upon a time I had a hole in my equipment replacement cycle. This was filled by picking up a bunch of refurb HP DC7700's to replace some old WinXP boxes to meet the deadline for getting shot of those. These PC's came with a refurb license to Win7 and some years later I spotted an opportunity to buy some things that we did want by keeping some of these boxes in use for an extra few years so a good half of these boxes ended up with a life extension by replacing the HDD's with SSD's, stuffing them full of ram (gained from robbing their peers that were being disposed of) and gaining a Quadro multi monitor card to give them a pair of screens.
They'd all been removed by 2020 as Win7's EOL meant they'd finally been replaced with actually new PC's. They were in a neat stack waiting to be disposed of properly (WEE disposal) when the pandemic hit and we didn't have enough laptops for issue for home use, so we installed Win10 and issued the 7700's; some of which still haven't come back. (and to be fair, we did say that we didn't particularly want them back and people could keep them if they wanted them as a free gift...)
They are now 16 years old and running just fine for acting as a thin client for remote access, and reportedly are fine for doing kids homework, web browsing etc.
I'm unconvinced that at replacing desktops every 3 (or gasp; 4) years is really required.
For that matter I've got a HP Proliant 380p G8 running 2012R2 that is over 10 years old; and it's still absolutely fine. (although as a replication spare for DR it's not exactly got a high load...) For that matter, I've actually floated the idea of buying an additional server 2022 license for it to use as a DR testbed when 2012R2 comes out of support in October and that's probably going to happen because the cost is trivial for the capability delivered.
Why throw things away that still work perfectly? Obviously you don't stick the old hardware in mission critical roles, but they are perfectly capable when managed correctly; typically receptionists etc don't actually need a 32 core CPU with 128GB of RAM...
Around here it seems like Windows support (lack of?) usually drives the hardware purchasing.
Which sounds reasonable enough at first glance, until you end up replacing perfectly good kit every other year because Microsoft dropped support for some CPU or the memory usage doubled in Windows 11 or similar.
> So that's supposed to be a problem ?
Right? At previous $job the central IT group enforced desktop & laptop PC changes about every 2-3 years, primarily because whatever next version of Windows they were mandating either wasn't supported on the deployed kit, and/or because Windows N+1 consumed even more memory than N and the status quo gear didn't have enough.
Meanwhile I used the same 5+ year-old PC and a hand-me-down laptop with Linuxes and would have kept on that way just fine if IT hadn't declared any non-Windows device as unsupportable and locked them out of the LAN.
This wasn't a small place, either; the amount of PC gear they churned through (and in many cases, outright wasted) was appalling. Almost entirely because of central IT policy and bureaucracy.
Meanwhile in the datacenter and labs we regularly ran servers for 5+ years, sometimes longer when it made sense vs. rackspace, power, duties, fleet size + spares, etc.
If Salesforce want some efficiencies, I’d suggest they ditch the Freak Inhabitants of Salesforcelandia that contaminate the Lightning Experience consuming countless CPU Cycles.
Astro and his Woke friends are second rate Pokémon - Deviants, Perverts, and Bestial up the dogging Trailhead.
Sounds like they are now a mature business. Welcome to the world of investor pressure and board bonuses.
Short termism ultimately causes the churn of technology leaders and makes space of the disruptors. I admire those corporations leaders that avoid the rot, most don't.
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