I did not see the original post on this thread, but would like to add
that there is a perception in micro business and nonprofit worlds that
the learning curve from PC to Mac/Apple is large. As most of the
incoming workforce and the volunteer base grew up on PCs, this may be
another reason to keep from switching.
Not valid, necessarily, imo, but a real perception regardless.
/gayley knight
mothergeek.com
businessherway.net
On Sep 22, 2008, at 10:07 AM, Tom Piwowar wrote:
Well thank you for proving my point, though I don't appreciate the
crudity and am not quoting that part of your post. When you have to
resort to crudity it is a good sign that your case is not a good
one. You
are only trying to squelch discussion.
An organization that has to depend on second-hand donations and vendor
give aways is clearly not operating in a free market. Just like
someone
sleeping on a park bench on a cold Winter night is not exercising a
free
market preference for cold and hard beds.
So back to my original statement. In a distorted, non-free market
popularity is not a good surrogate for perceived quality. You don't
get
to attribute quality using a "10,000,000 Frenchmen can't be wrong"
type
of argument.
I guess it is time to insert a little economy into the discussion of
why people buy PC's with windows.
1. Most Non-Profits, like the one that I volunteer for seem to
perpetually have a lack of funds to purchase PC's. Lots of what they
get are second hand donations which makes the price correct.
2. Many small business's of 3-10 persons like law, medical and
accounting offices purchase their PC's base on bang for the buck.
which means price.
I bought a client 4 Dell's from MicroCenter for $399 each, they came
with XP Pro, 1gig Ram and 80 gig hard disks. And a keyboard and mouse
included. No monitors but cheap LCD's abound.
3. Non-Profits can purchase software and hardware thru TechSoup,
which MS sells their XP pro for around $8 a copy. And MS Office pro
for about the same.
Of course the Non-Profit that I volunteer for has around 120
workstations and 8 windows 2003 servers. No Apple products were
available for them to purchase at a cheap price like Intel PC's and
MS products. They did get a really good price break from Dell on
their servers and switch's.
(I don't think that the BOD would approve purchasing MAC's when they
can get Windows PC's for a small amount of outlay.)
Techsoup is the primary place for validated non-profit's to acquire
hardware and software at real cheap prices. No Apple products seem
to be visible. I understand that Apple does provide software/hardware
in small amounts to some non-profits that jump thru the many-many
hoops to get it.
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