 Made in China, Worried in America
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There are two sides to every yuan. I have a friend whose business takes him over to China once or twice a year. He’s brought back the usual bevy of street-hawked wares: Waterproof North Face coats with pockets that rip out after one season. Prada purses with the lining sewn in upside-down. (Being that I think $500 purses are asinine, I was OK with my wife owning one of these flawed units for $25.) Custom tailored clothes that never arrive on time. The one bit of street shlock I ordered for myself two or three years ago was a couple of first-run movies on DVD. And they looked fair enough...if you didn’t mind the mandatory subtitles...because the audio was in Mandarin
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Fuzzy Facts And Fiction
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All right. AMD’s quad-core Barcelona is released and the reviews are coming in. I’ve invested more time to learning about Barcelona than I care to admit in the last month, and it’s clear to me that if you just skim this week’s headlines you stand a serious chance of misinterpreting several important things. Shall we?
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Show Me The Quality!
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Nothing hammers the emergency bells quite as fast as a hardware failure. When a customer comes in from a weekend off and a desktop or, God forbid, a server won’t power on, you’d better believe he’s going to light up your phone line. As catastrophic as the problem might seem, there’s usually little the reseller can do to prevent it. Often times, manufacturers aren’t even at fault when a piece of electronics dies. Talk about a frustrating service call. Fortunately, as you sit there troubleshooting, trying to figure out why that critical machine is stalled out, dead in the water, hardware vendors are trying to figure out how to make their components last longer.
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Time To Rethink The Living Room PC
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Every time I see a new home entertainment PC, I fall in love. A car enthusiast by nature, I'm drawn to sleek lines and long spec sheets loaded with the latest and greatest features. But good looks don't always translate into an exhilarating test drive. Perhaps that's why the living room PC concept has puttered along slowly, despite high-octane fuel from Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center Edition and Intel's Viiv initiative. What's the problem? Too much PC, not enough appliance? Nowhere to put a mouse and keyboard while you're sitting on the couch? Trouble making connections from the back of a PC to the real hub of an entertainment center, the stereo receiver? All of the above.
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Face, Meet Palm
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Most of the time, being a channel reseller is a rewarding gig. I enjoy helping SMBs work smarter using the latest technology. Those are the customers who really appreciate your work. By making money, you’re helping someone else make more as well. But I’d be lying if I said the job was all sugar cubes and roses. ...Full Story
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Time to Embrace Your Enemy?
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When my family moved three years ago, we bought a new fridge from Home Depot. It had all of the features we wanted for the best price—about $100 less than Lowe's or Sears, as I recall—and it was scheduled to arrive the day after our move-in. Only it didn't. When the critical day came, there was no Home Depot delivery. So on top of the usual chaos of moving, I had to endure a flurry of phone calls, all of which entailed sitting on perma-hold, only to be presented in the end with a choice: I could have a model that I didn't want the next day or the one I did want in three days. Needless to say, after factoring in rotten food and restaurant bills, we more than gave back the $100 we'd saved, never mind the intangible cost of stress to the family....Full Story
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