> Hardware is cheap, people's time isn't. Sadly it's not always that simple. People's time, salaries, falls into the base expenditure. Hardware acquisition i

> Hardware is cheap, people's time isn't. Sadly it's not always that simple. People's time, salaries, falls into the base expenditure. Hardware acquisition is a discretionary cost, which is usually squeezed particularly in a cost-centre like IT support. Or the existing hardware is under a multi-year lease from a vendor like Dell or HP and has to be paid-for whether it's obsolete or not. Where I've worked ( big non-IT-orientated companies ) it's more typical to throw a couple of people onto a project to debug and refactor an application than buy better hardware. Or even worse, implement a new project on existing shared hardware.