4 ms·

You're not looking at the big picture. The PC is dead -- it's a commodity now. I work in a big enterprise IT shop with tens of thousands of PCs. We have manage

by Duff 15y ago

You're not looking at the big picture. The PC is dead -- it's a commodity now. I work in a big enterprise IT shop with tens of thousands of PCs. We have management software that meters application utilization. 85% of application runtime on PCs is devoted to: Microsoft Word, Outlook and IE. Most of the other 15% are in-house apps, with a long tail of various tools that people use. Yet the per-seat cost of a desktop is over $100/year for basic licensing, $75/year for Office and about $250/year for hardware, assuming a 4-year refresh cycle. For 10,000 people, that's $4.25M of annual cash flow just to provide clients to workers -- no infrastructure costs, no operational staff costs. (Those costs are easily $50-100/seat, depending on the org) That's a ridiculous amount of money. So there's a huge opportunity to offer a solution that improves productivity by hacking away at that cost. Compare the management features of an iPad/iPhone/BlackBerry to ChromeOS -- they are nearly identical. Lower labor costs plus less licensing means enterprise adoption. Technically, the solution just needs to be "good enough".

brudgers 15y ago
$4.25 million/10,000 employees = $425/employee Retraining costs associated with switching to a different platform would be approximately an order of magnitude higher - i.e. you're looking at > 10 years to break even assuming zero cost for the new system.
- stcredzero 15y ago
  The real savings is finding ways to do work more efficiently with newer form factors. Employee time is expensive. If having a small mobile form factor can save steps and a trip back to the desk, it's a win for the big enterprise.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- Duff 15y ago
  Yeah, sure. I've spent a ton of time migrating people from different mail platforms to a single, larger platform. When people fight to hang on to Lotus Notes or GroupWise, they make statements like that and roll out scary cost figures, etc. At the end of the day, you train the admin assistants, a few key users, etc for 1/10 of the cost the people estimate. After the first week of chaos, you start hearing from regular users how much better the new system is. Millions of people figure out how to use iPads and GMail without any documentation, IT department or training classes. Enterprises are no different.

by Duff 15y ago

brudgers 15y ago

$4.25 million/10,000 employees = $425/employee Retraining costs associated with switching to a different platform would be approximately an order of magnitude higher - i.e. you're looking at > 10 years to break even assuming zero cost for the new system.

stcredzero 15y ago
The real savings is finding ways to do work more efficiently with newer form factors. Employee time is expensive. If having a small mobile form factor can save steps and a trip back to the desk, it's a win for the big enterprise.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
Duff 15y ago
Yeah, sure. I've spent a ton of time migrating people from different mail platforms to a single, larger platform. When people fight to hang on to Lotus Notes or GroupWise, they make statements like that and roll out scary cost figures, etc. At the end of the day, you train the admin assistants, a few key users, etc for 1/10 of the cost the people estimate. After the first week of chaos, you start hearing from regular users how much better the new system is. Millions of people figure out how to use iPads and GMail without any documentation, IT department or training classes. Enterprises are no different.