Small Business IT mistake 2: Old Equipment

The most common small business mistake we see is old equipment. The office struggles with a bunch of decrepit pentium IIIs running Windows ME, crashing regularly and taking five times as long to do a job.

It's quite understandable for a business owner to hold onto old kit. IT equipment is a major capital cost and upgrading computers always involves money, time and pain.

But that cost and time is worth it. Slow old computers are a false economy. The whole idea of computers is help people do their jobs better and quicker.

One of the worst clients I had was a food distributor that had a terrible old machine. Every afternoon he received emails from his clients with the next day's orders. Almost every day his machine would crash.

In one year he spent over two thousand dollars in unnecessary support costs. What's more, he lost a number of days orders. I would guess that one dodgy computer cost him ten of thousands in lost orders and disaffected customers.

Saying "the computer is down" is one of the worst possible images your staff can give customers. It looks shoddy and unprofessional.

Ten years ago customers might have nodded sagely and accepted "the computer done it" as an excuse. Today they won't, they’ll take their business elsewhere.

Five year old equipment is the limit. Older than five years and computers become unreliable. Once past that five year limit the odds are high that you'll see hard drives, power supplies and motherboards failing.

One of the strangest attitudes I see in home and small business IT is the owner knows their systems are old and decrepit. But they are waiting for the Next Big Thing™.

The problem in the computer industry is there will always be a Next Big Thing™. When this big thing arrives there will be another coming soon after.

Often a business finds itself rushed into replacing the old computers when one gives up the ghost, or they find the new printer or software just won't work with the older equipment.

This is when businesses make the next mistake; they grab the first thing they see when they need the new computer, they either pay too much for substandard equipment or buy on price and suffer the consequences.

$4000 dollars a year to support a laptop?

Infoworld reports that a Microsoft and Wipro study shows the annual cost of a Windows Vista laptop is only $3,802, while XP costs $4,407.

Let me repeat those figures.

Three thousand, eight hundred and two dollars compared to four thousand, four hundred and seven dollars.

That's per year.

Someone's kidding themselves. If I gave a client those numbers they'd go back to using abacuses, pilot pigeons and carbon paper.

There's no doubt the figures are fudged. 55% of the number comes from indirect cost and all but 5% is "User labor: Primarily self support and time spent learning to use IT systems".

The study also assumes all users have full admin rights. I suspect this actually understates the $635 per year direct support costs for XP in the study. Users screwing their machines through installing spyware and filesharing programs is a huge issue which seems to be a much smaller problem with Vista.

What interests me from a quick reading of the WIPRO study is that the savings seem to be mainly in the direct setup costs. This would be consistent with improved management tools for both Vista and Server 2003.

So while it is probably true rollout costs are cheaper for a properly kitted enterprise it means Vista's value proposition for home and small business users is dubious at best.

The other interesting point is the user labor number remains unchanged. This indicates businesses should be investing more in training and Microsoft's changes to the Vista and Office 2007 user interface hasn't helped those who use MS products for a living.

I'm not sure releasing figures like this will help Microsoft convince customers to upgrade. The idea of a laptop costing 4,000 per year is going to scare a lot of computer and business owners away from.

Dodgy hardware

Brother's problems with their multifunction printers as reported in today's Sydney Morning Herald don't surprise anyone in the industry.

We haven't recommended Brother for years. Their printers have been flakey and the software that controls the multifunction units has been dreadful and buggy.

From a tech's point of view, these sort of problems are the worst. The client expects you to be able to fix them, but you can't do anything about an "error 41".

In the worst case, you've come out on a "no fix, no fee" basis. You can't fix it, so you don't get paid. It's another reason why I'm dubious about doing jobs with this guarantee.

The quotes from the techs are instructive. My guess is some of these guys spent a lot of non chargeable time on these problems.

The lesson here for a customer is to do your research before buying. Have a look at the models on the market and which ones meet your needs. Then fire up the search engine of your choice and type in the model name with the word "problem" at the end.

That way, you go fully informed into the market and hopefully will avoid a dog. It also means your computer tech will love you too.