Taking a break from politics (now that the election is finally over after 200 years), the WSJ BizTech blog has an interesting (to me, at least) post on delaying the PC lifecycle:

http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2008/11/14/how-old-is-your-work-computer/

I’ve been through this a number of times in the last 10 years, and short-term cost cutting always wins.  In a way, it makes some sense if the timing is right (for instance, when it’s year-end and delaying the purchase by a month or two can improve the balance sheet).  But delaying by a year or more becomes expensive, particularly when those computers are used by non-salaried employees or when deadlines are affected by slow computing resources.  Unfortunately, it’s harder to quantify the money lost by workers twiddling their thumbs than the fixed purchase of computers, so cost cutting wins.

Companies are even more likely to not buy computers (and other assets) because of the declining economy.  But this is the exact time to buy!  Computer vendors are going to be desperate to sell anything, and prices are better than ever.  Also, computers are assets and should be depreciated over at least three years, so the hit to the balance sheet is low.  The hard part for managers will be to overcome the natural hesitation in a recession to stop doing anything when doing nothing just feeds the downward spiral.

All right, I’m done being a computer (and business) geek for the moment.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 15th, 2008 at 16:50 and is filed under tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.