Re: If there were a sufficient money stream in the "ma and pas", IBM would

On 8/1/06, Jerome Hughes <jromeh@xxxxxxx> wrote:

things were different back then, but it's usually all in how you look
at things

many small customers can be a beautiful thing, depending on how well
dealings with them are managed

for a current example of a business building itself from the small, see

   http://www.37signals.com

not payroll (sorry, Anne) but still real applications as reasonably
priced easily adopted services for small businesses providing a
"money stream" while being the opposite of "office" applications with
a small set of only appropriate features - the sort of apps, like the
gApps, etc. that have BillCo concerned enough to be adopting "Live"
strategies

provides a glimpse of one direction in which that (large) market (of
small businesses) may head, routing around the "need" for big
hardware or support staff

they've also extracted a web application framework from one of the
apps and are having some success with it

   http://www.rubyonrails.org

Looks great. How is the geared down, over priced i5 supposed to
compete in todays marketplace?

By ITJungle's calcs, the i5 for small business costs twice as much
with 1/3 the capacity of a Xeon based server.
http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh073106-story01.html
http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh073106-story01-fig01.html

-Steve