Dean Kent (dkent@realworldtech.com) on 5/14/07 wrote:
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>JasonB (no@spam.com) on 5/14/07 wrote:
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>>
>>(Note that whenever something is expensive for the manufacturers, it's generally
>>the end users that actually pay for it.)
>
>Of course it is - but it still remains that in a competitive environment, passing
>costs on to the customer is not desireable. Therefore, anything that can reduce costs is considered necessary.

A corollary is that in a competitive environment, any time costs are reduced, these will be passed on pretty much immediately.

There are other benefits as well, at least in our case. We spent six months working on support for large images in our software ("large" = "more than 250 megapixels") so it could handle two of those very well on a machine with 1GB of RAM; if the world had moved to 64 bits a couple of years before it did we could have spent that time adding other features to our software instead (which in our case is a lot of new functionality).

>Based upon your own experience, how 'current' are most of your customers machines?
>In my own office, at least half of the staff still use PIII based systems, and 99% of the rest use P4's.

Our software is expensive, it will use all the CPU power you can throw at it, the people who use our software are highly paid, and labour is very scarce. PCs are cheap. A new PC only has to increase the employee's overall productivity by about 2-3% and it has already paid for itself. Because of this our customers tend to have very good equipment, although some employers are yet to fully understand the above and their employees are still using PCs 2-3 years old. But most buy new PCs when they buy our software.

Our developers are using Core 2 Duos and Athlon X2s for pretty much the same reason -- they improve the productivity of our developers. The rest of the company gets hand-me-downs from the developers so they are probably better off than most.