bzs@ENCORE.COM (Barry Shein) (11/30/88)
There's an interesting article in this week's Computerworld about "Downsizing" and how it seems to be the doom of MIS types who wear expensive suits. Downsizing means replacing your impressive-looking, power-sucking mainframe clunker with a bunch of PC's because the latter actually get the work done faster/better/cheaper. The problem they allude to (and has been approved by FUD, Inc) is now that you are in charge of a bunch of dumb ole PC's who wants to pay you six digits anymore to help folks change floppies and fight christmas tree virii? So they replace you with the boss's pimply 17-year old kid and productivity really goes up (for everyone but you.) Does anyone want to guess at the number of mainframes in this world which could be replaced with a few PC's or workstations or even (ahem) $300K 100MIPS parallel minis*? How about five years from now? I mean really, how much juice do you need to keep track of payroll for 5,000 employees anyhow? But be sure to hide the joysticks when the auditors show up! -Barry Shein, ||Encore|| * A mainframe is any machine which costs $5M or more and no one dares ask why.
dave@celerity.UUCP (David L. Smith) (12/01/88)
In article <8811300409.AA13002@multimax.encore.com> bzs@ENCORE.COM (Barry Shein) writes: >Downsizing means replacing your impressive-looking, power-sucking >mainframe clunker with a bunch of PC's because the latter actually get >the work done faster/better/cheaper. The problem they allude to (and >has been approved by FUD, Inc) is now that you are in charge of a >bunch of dumb ole PC's who wants to pay you six digits anymore to help >folks change floppies and fight christmas tree virii? So they replace >you with the boss's pimply 17-year old kid and productivity really >goes up (for everyone but you.) The problem with this "solution" is that without any expert guidance, users can do the damndest things. This usually involves them: a) doing all their word processing with Lotus 1-2-3 because it "says it's a word processor" b) writing numerical analysis programs in dBase II c) keeping all their files in the root directory of their hard disk because they don't understand sub-directories. d) massive cabling kludges to enable them to share printers. e) any number of other silly things. All too often it is assumed that because PC's are cheap they don't need someone who knows what they're doing (and is therefore expensive) to supervise their users. The amount of time and effort that can be saved by having an expert around to guide users to appropriate solutions to their problems is enormous. ============= David L. Smith FPS Computing, San Diego ucsd!celerity!dave