Thomas David Rivers wrote:
Yeah - that's what I meant by a "white box distributor"
I mean - presumably - that's an attempt to drive the purchase price
down - not up?
No. It's an attempt to standardize the environment with machine that are
all alike. "White box distributors" just make boxes with whatever is on
the shelf at the time (although Dell sometimes does this too). This
results in five boxes with five different combinations of motherboard,
video board, sound card, CD drive, etc. When a company (or other
entitiy) goes out for a VPA, they want each box to be identical within
the lot; if they get several lots of machines, they can vary between
lots. This make maintenance a great deal easier with "fewer" people.
These companies don't care if they save on the hardware, when the
"wetwear" (support personnel) cost so much more.
So - if those are the retail walk-in prices, I would
hope that a corporate IT dept. could do better...
As I said, they don't care about HW prices, its the support costs that
hurt. Support as few different combinations as possible. Replace, not
repair. Etc., etc., and so forth.
Kim Goldenberg
State of NJ - OIT
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