I was pricing out a new computer system for a client recently and noticed that perhaps the traditional shopping rules and guidelines that I had been accustomed to had changed. And they had not changed for the better. The press is saying that the PC industry is in a slump (at least until the coming holiday season) and PC bargains galore can be had. Perhaps not so.
In the PC business, there are three tiers of vendors. The top tier is composed of the big names you probably know - Dell, Gateway, Compaq, IBM, etc. Generally the top tier gives you good value for your money, and usually the best service and support. The middle tier is composed of companies that operate similarly to the top tier, but aren't as well known and don't have quite the same level of service. Buying in the middle tier gets you more value for your money (i.e. better or faster components), but the service level might not be good for a novice or home user. The bottom tier is in effect parts vendors - these just buy whatever parts they can on the open market, and put systems together on a day to day basis. There isn't much service in the third tier.
I usually buy in the third tier myself, recommend second tier for my knowledgeable home users looking for leading edge parts, and first tier for my business clients who needed stability and service. But in all cases, the PCs from these companies were always built to order. You specified the parts you wanted, and they would custom build and test them for you. IBM lost its dominance in the PC business in the 90's because they failed to get on the build-to-order bandwagon early enough.
Last night, I found that perhaps the rules had changed, at least for one top tier vendor. Since I don't like to disparage companies in print, I will just refer to it as Company X, or just X. When I went to the X website, I found that they had three levels of individual client workstations. The budget layer was appropriately priced, but had inferior components. But the big issue is that you couldn't feature up those components - you could only select from a very limited choice. For example, I could not ask for a high-speed 40 GB, 7200 rpm, ATA 100 hard drive to be put in that configuration.
If I then moved up to the middle level system, the components were more modern, but again weren't very competitive vs. the price. Even worse, they bundled a very large and expensive software package with it and you COULD NOT configure a system without this expensive package.
In either case, I could not order a system with MS Windows 2000 Server. To get the server OS, I had to configure what they referred to as a server system, which was far more expensive.
I called X and spoke to a salesperson to verify my findings. He did. I told him that it would not be likely that I would buy from X in the future. He told me that they were competitive to Y and Z (both also top tier vendors) and that was good enough. By the way, X has been severely criticized in recent publications for a downturn in its support quality.
So, the rules seem to have changed, at least in the top tier. The moral of this story: be careful what you shop for - shopping by brand name may no longer be good enough.
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport / Oak Island area. You can visit his website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail him at bsc@bobseidel.com).