Re: Question: How will the Year 2000 bug impact your work?

R.Horrocks (horrocks.richard.r@bhp.com.au) wrote: : David W. Fenton wrote: : > : > Alicia Carla Longstreet (carla@ici.net) wrote: : >(SNIP) Buy old 'outdated' PC's give them new life with a new BIOS : > (SNIP) : > This is ridiculous. : > : > What will you _run_ on these PCs? : > : > Wordstar 3.0? : > : > The vast majority of these computers will have been retired by the year : > 2000 simply because they won't be able to run up-to-date software (486 : > computers don't usually do terribly well with Win95, and not well at all : > with NT). By 2000, 486's will be at least four to five years old, and five : > years is the point at which a business PC has been fully depreciated and : > can be retired. : > : > You hardly see any 386's out there any more, (SNIP) : : Ah Mr Fenton, someone who works in and deals only with big(ish) : companies eh? . . . You decide. Of my 50 clients (one of which went out of business last month, with about 100 employees), here's the breakdown since the beginning of 1996: Active # of Employees # of Clients % Billed Clients % Billed 1 14 25% 9 29% 2-5 7 7% 1 4% 6-15 16 35% 6 50% 16-25 3 2% 0 0% 26-50 5 5% 1 4% 51-75 2 6% 2 9% 76+ 3 19% 1 3% Seventy-nine percent of my billings in the last three months have been to businesses with 15 or fewer employees. Twenty-nine percent in that same period was for individuals/independent contractors with only _one_ employee. So, big companies only, or not? : . . . I can assure you that there are a lot of people out there : in the world of small business that are happily using Wordperfect and : much older software (WordStar for example) for word processing duties on : DOS, let alone Win 311. WP and small Database/Spreadsheet stuff really : isn't that difficult and they really don't care about the computer as : long as it does what they ask of it. . . My clients want Win95 and Micro$oft Office. In fact, it's my _big_ clients that are more likely to still be using DOS-based software and running on 386's. : . . .I have run into plenty of XT's and : AT's happily churning away and 386's might not be seen in big business : or academia by by God they are out there in droves believe me! . . . Perhaps NYC is different? I haven't seen an XT in a business office or in a person's home in three years. I know of only one person who still uses an XT, and that's because it's his old computer, which he leaves at his summer house. He only uses it when he has to, and he's about to replace the main home 486, so that XT will be going in the trash. : . . .Why do : most people need all the functionality of Word 7 and Win95? Answer is : they don't and 90% of users only regularily use a small subset of the : functionality available. You can do more with Windows, whether 3.1 or 95, and you can do it better. My clients need to keep up with their competition, so I guess they feel compelled to buy new equipment. If I had any clients who wanted to stay with DOS software, I'd help them, of course. I don't have any. : Just as a final exapmple, I was called in to solve a problem in stock : control and ordering system in a fairly large Hardware wholesaler : business up country. The problem was the business was being sold by the : retiring Boss and they were trying to run a report that they had never : run before which wasn't working. When I got there I found an ancient PC : of indeterminate age, probably a Commadore (The sticker had gone) : running a CPM operating system with a custom shell written to run the : stock system. When I asked why it hadn't been replaced the reply was : 'Why? It does the job real fine!' One of my clients is running a massively complex Lotus 2.x spreadsheet on 286's & 386's. I periodically have to repair it when things break. If they're happy, I'm happy. But they could be doing much better with less trouble and a lot less waiting around for things to calculate and print if they would invest some money in up-to-date computer equipment and software. They don't want to do that, so they spend the money instead in reduced productivity, increased training costs for new employees, and the cost of paying me to come in every now and again and spend 2 hours untangling someone else's spaghetti macros just to figure out which _single_ cell of the worksheet I have to alter. The customer's always right I guess. David W. Fenton | New York University | The way of stylistic tolerance dfenton@bway.net | dwf4930@is2.nyu.edu | may lead to the final horror of http://www.bway.net/~dfenton | John Tesh. --Alex Ross, NYTimes