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In early 2001, leading IT market research firm
Gartner Dataquest announced that the U.S. PC market shrank by 3.5
percent, compared to the same period a year earlier. This was the
first industry contraction in seven years.
One only can wonder if as the hardware giants
reduce headcount, expenses and R&D, will consumers become an
extended R&D facility? This revelation is really nothing new to
the PC industry.
For at least a decade, PC owners and small
businesses have had to grapple with a continuous stream of updated
hardware device driver software and reprogrammable firmware updates.
The trouble is, from the time problems are
first reported, analyzed, diagnosed and ultimately fixed through
updates, someone has to suffer with unreliable hardware
products. If you’re looking to control computer support costs, you
don’t want to be your hardware vendor’s guinea pig.
Lots of Windows
There’s one more variable to consider in all
this: operating systems. I cannot recall a time in recent
memory when anywhere near six current generation mainstream
operating systems were on the market, and that’s just from
Microsoft.
PC hardware vendors need to support everything
including Microsoft Windows 95, Windows NT 4, Windows 98, Windows
2000, Windows Millennium Edition (Me) and Windows XP.
Now if six versions of Microsoft Windows
weren’t enough, consider all the service releases and service
packs that accompany the products. So you easily can see why there
is so much potential for major headaches with PC
hardware-induced computer support problems.
One simple way to avoid most of this aggravation: Don’t be the
first to jump at new products.
Action Items
Have you ever purchased a PC hardware
product that just came on the market, but subsequently found the
product to be very buggy and unreliable?
Have
you ever called into a PC vendor's technical support department for
assistance and discovered that the representative was unaware that
the new product even existed?
How many different versions of Microsoft Windows are in use within
your company? Has this caused any problems in the past as you
upgrade and replace PC hardware?
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