From: lioness@maple.circa.ufl.edu
Subject: Re: SGI sales practices (Was: Crimson (Was: Kubota Announcement?))
Organization: Center for Instructional and Research Computing Activities
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Reply-To: LIONESS@ufcc.ufl.edu
NNTP-Posting-Host: maple.circa.ufl.edu

In article <1rr6c3$9u3@calvin.NYU.EDU>, roy@mchip00.med.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) writes:
|>	What's really interesting is that from what I can tell, the MIS
|>folks in the basement with their ES/9000 don't seem to be pissed at IBM.
|>Why?  I have no idea.  Either IBM really does take care of their customers
|>better, or they just have their customers brainwashed better than the
|>smaller vendors do.

No, MIS folks have infinite budgets of death, and they also get parts
of their budget allocated "upgrades", "maintenance", and "new purchases",
and a lot of IBM mainframe purchases are actually "leases" and so
is the software.

Basically, the engineers who have tight budgets, i.e. the coders and
designers of a company, bitch and moan when they drop 15,000 on a 
Sparc 1 only to see a faster machine appear a year later.  MIS types
upgrade once every 5-10 years, and their costs are amortized and
depreciated over a longer period, and the budget office justifies
the expense because they actually use the machines for accounting,
payroll, etc.

Now, if the budget office was dependant on the engineers for some
reason like payroll and accounts, you'd sure as hell see every
engineer with a new Cray on his desktop every year. :-)

Brian