Posts by terry 1 41 posts • joined 7 Oct 2010
My youngest had to return an AMD processor (also to Holland) and it just dragged on with him, the courier and AMD having to state the price, and often was the wrong price for customs declaration. Under RMA there needs to be a declaration of £0 with it being a warranty repair. All got resolved in the end but took a lot of leg work
It wasn't initially brought for that purpose, it was to remote hard restart some client equipment which eventually was replaced. Too good to chuck out.
I did have a timer and a dusk sensor but the wife drew the line at sensors so it now sits in the garage running a run of led down lighters.
I try and avoid any IoT device because at some point in the future the maker will shut the server off. At the moment I do have a smart switch, it controls the outside lights at the front and has been very good, comes on at dusk, off at 23:00 and I can turn them on via the app if im late home, but I also know that one day it will stop functioning.
Built in obsolescence, ~5 years then computer says no
Earlier this year they announced they were stopping SBE antivirus / SMSMSE as a package and selling them individually. Surprise surpise the combined price of both was near double what the package was.
So for my smaller clients, they have Avast free for business and only SMSMSE looking after their Exchange. Although the price is the same, it's Symantec that has ultimatlely lost out on revenue as the only thing that keeps me using SMSME is the fine control I have on content filtering - something I have yet to find on other Exchange protection software.
As a small business supplier, I would guess that some of their losses are down to
- Adoption to 365, so who needs to buy OEM office?
- i3 / i5 machines good at what they do, no significant speed improvements over the last few years (ignoring ssds etc)
- People happy to stay on W7 on their i3 / i5s
- Reduced server HW sales since it's all going to the cloud.
I would imagine that a lot of dizzies will struggle in the future as people move to the cloud. Eventually I see all PCs will become glorified thin clients an become a throw away white good, same as a microwave.
I suspect their big profits were down to lack of competition at the time, but as people got familiar with the likes of time and tiny etc, pcs ended up being cheaper anyway. I recall my 486 DX2/66 with 4mb of ram cost IRO £1200 back around 93/94, now I can get a crap (branded) one for sub £200. Account for a windows key, the cost of the hardware, I suspect the margin for that is probably £20 to the dizzy.
As for W10 killing the market, yes, to some degree. Consumers are quite happy with their XP / Vista / W7 machines and are put off by the negativity that surrounds 'tiles / start menu', however in the business world *I* don't feel much has changed. i'm still buying in W7 pcs for clients and have no intention of taking them futher until forced to.
And how many of those boxes have dozy users logged on and wandering around dubious websites?
I don't think the risks are any where are big as XP. None of the few 2k3 boxes I look after are connected to the internet so where's the risk?
My customers will replace when needed, not because they need to.
I suppose it makes sense for some, but I can't get my head around why people want to put their customers on 365 and then never see any future renewal profit.
I look after one company that has 50 or so mailboxes spread over 8 locations. I considered a hosted exchange as £6 / month / mailbox doesn't seem much, but scale that up to 50 or £300 a month and suddenly the costs become significant. In less than 18 months it becomes cheaper to buy a basic server, exchange and cals and self host.
I'm not entirely sure that MS should be to blame here.Yes, W8 is a bitch and shoving everything into the cloud means less recurring profits, however as an ex insight user/buyer I found that their prices were often higher than say ebuyer, had poor range, their couriers turned up often 3 days later than expected and they had such a high 'account manager' churn that I had no idea who my manager is / was.
So their losses doesn't surprise me
How many years have we have the benefits of virtualising the desktop rammed down our necks. Now it's been done there's no need to replace the desktop PC. Thin clients in it's many forms only needs to be replaced when it fails.
I realise that the biggest cause is 8, but how many years has el reg been pushing desktop virtualisation!!
Lets assume that people want this, the channel get a nice big lump of referral cash, but then in the future nothing.
I would prefer to continually receive an income over the years rather than a big slice that will be taxed to death
I have a client that has 1 man offices around the UK which 365 would likely be ideal, however once I lose that desktop support to the cloud im losing business.
Its the end users that are still the biggest problem. The number of calls I get from people who had received a yahoo email from their friend with a single URL that was a jumble of letters and they STILL opened it. Despite myself doing a round robin email saying that there's a run on this type of spam.
Across my client base I look after free AV, MSE, Avast, AVG etc some have paid for such as Kaspersky and biz have Symantec with Brightmail, others use Sophos. None really do 100% protection, most sort of contains it, but interestingly I have seen limited accounts get infected even on W7 boxes with ACL on.
All we can do is learn how to get rid and carry a bartPE around.
HPs still come with W7p as does Fujitsu's.
I have to say that im shifting far more Lenovos than other brands. Reasonable quality at a good price.
At a previous comment, whats wrong with OEM in enterprise? If your defining an enterprise as 1000's of nodes I would agree, but I use enterprise software and servers in businesses with 10 or less PCs. OEM is not really that different to volume once its been rolled out.
A client staff member near Solihull had a NTLDR sort of error on the laptop and took it to the shop who said it was a dead drive and replaced it. She was gutted that the data and all her family photos had been lost. I pointed out that NTLDR is usually a corrupt registry and totally repairable and that it was highly likely the hard drive was fine.
I expressed a view over the situation and said she needs to go back to the shop and get the old drive as she has a right to ownership. She did but it had been 'disposed off', which in my mind means 'sold on'.
She was charged £160.
I once worked in a computer shop around 1999, I was forced to sell a 56k modem (internal) inc installation for something like £90, but the worst rip off was the old CD-to-motherboard audio cable. Old bloke came in the shop wanting one, I watched the owner sell him one for £14.
His business lasted around 2 years, mines been going for 11. Difference is I don't rip people off.
Make the enterprise a really expensive place to be, then offer their own cloud solutions at a lower price with the hope that suits will go for the cheaper option.
Maybe its just cheaper to have loadsa virtual W7 pcs acting as file servers and just group 10 users to each one and have a nas box for mapping the network drives to </joke> </maybe>
That is a tiny margin and not surprising that they are closing. But as LarsG said, you can get cheaper online so I would imagine they kept cutting the margins to pennies per sale until there was nothing left other than give it away.
I guess thats the problem these days is there's no profitability in anything as consumers demand cheaper goods because their income in diminishing, but then when the employers go out of business due to unstainabilitiy then more people become unemployed. Its a vicious circle.
Anyone who's buying in Xmas stock will have already got what they need before the prices go up anyway, we never buy hardware in December and only some in November.
Plus I don't think that the UK was going to be buying 48 million PCs.
Our suppliers are holding several thousand of each make and model. So I suspect there are box shifters who need to make a bit of a push to get rid and what a better way to suggest a shortage to induce a little panic buying.
For years I have been making up 'company related' email addresses for the companies that I deal with on a casual basis. Just recently I have been getting spam to cts@ - thats the 'computer trade show' in brum that I attended a few years ago. Guess the email addresses have been leaked / sold.
When I then stop needing an email address I either block it on exchange or in a rule in outlook.
More hardware requirements, harder to manage and way more expensive. Sounds like another SBS upgrade.
On the basis that im still rolling out 2003 because it just works and is CHEAP, I won't be looking at that version for a few years yet.
As for the cloud, get 100% uptime on adsl, a handful of cross location companies that may find it useful, but since adsl can go down for days at a time I can see a huge amount of lost productivity, but lot of tea breaks. Plus, it only takes the marketing dept to upload their 200Mb presentation and the whole business grinds to a halt.
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