Many years ago there was an article that circulated around called “if Microsoft did cars”. The Apple version was complimentary but not the Microsoft one. We trawled all the cmx staff for their views as we sell both Apple and Microsoft and with the advent of the Apple car round the corner we were thinking and buzzing email ideas around.

If Microsoft Built Cars…

• All Microsoft Car owners think Apple car owners are morons
• If you were involved in a crash, you would have no idea what happened despite the fault message on the suddenly blue windscreen.
• The airbag system would say “are you sure?” before going off.
• New seats would force everyone to have the same size backside.
• The FBI will have the right under the Patriot ACT to sit in your car and go through your things.
• When your Microsoft Car10 goes wrong all your personal details, and everything you are carrying will be sent up to the cloud for storage without your consent.
• The oil, fuel and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single “general car default” warning light.
• You will be forced to “sign in” and upload your personal details when buying a car10 and it will check these details before it starts.
• Everything you want in a Windows car is freely available from an Open Source design, only no one will know about it as there are only Microsoft or Apple salespeople.
• Your cloud car will be available free of charge if you can find it as no one will tell you where you can get one free but its only there as competition for the free Google Car.
• You will be offered a Cloud car without alternatives, which will cost you three times as much over five years but you won’t notice because you are paying weekly.
• You could only have one person in the car at a time, unless you bought “Car2016” But, then you would have to buy more seats.
• Occasionally, executing a maneuver would cause your car to stop and fail and you would have to re-install the engine. For some strange reason, you would accept this too.
• Occasionally your car would die on the motorway for no reason, and you would just accept this, restart and drive on.
• Every time they repainted the lines on the road you would have to buy a new car.

And as for Apple cars

• All Apple Car owners think Microsoft car owners are morons
• It will look exactly like a spaceship but will have the same inside mechanicals as a Microsoft car at five times the price.
• The car will have wiring & seating technology invented at an obscure US University in the ’60’s but with an Apple twist.
• They will be simple to use with two buttons, “Go” and “Park” designed for non-drivers.
• There will initially be two versions, a single seater and a five seater
• Everything inside will have a name that doesn’t tell you what is does. The heater controls for example will be labelled “Mars – Spacial illusions” and the seat adjusters, “InterStellar”
• Your bank account will empty at random times for small amounts for an item such as “Sherpa” which is the charge for using the lights at night.
• Sometimes your Apple car will breakdown, usually after an upgrade, for some reason you will sit there waiting for it to work again which it miraculously does, after a fortnight, this you accept as a normal fantastic service.
• If your Apple Car won’t start you will have to take it in to the Apple Garage, where an Apple mechanic will do something magical for free and also charge you both at the same time but you will only remember the free bit and it not going wrong.
• Although built to a internationally agreed and EU enforced refueling standard, for some reason only “Apple” fuel will go in the tank and can only be paid for by ApplePay linked to your car.
• The In Car entertainment will only receive “Apple Radio”, Play Apple MP9’s, It will only play Apple CD’s with an expensive adapter. It will also play Apple iBash a new music standard which will be an updated copy of an old forgotten standard.
• Apple drivers would be convinced that the car was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast, twice as easy to drive and dispersed happiness and fairy dust wherever it went with an immunity to potholes, rain and traffic jams..
• The Apple car can only run on Apple 5 percent of the roads that are MAC compatible
• The Apple car will become outdated 12 months after release and you will just have to have the next model which does what the old car did but with something extra you wont use.
• There will be a queue outside the Apple showroom for 3 days before the first sale of each model.
• The Apple car owners would get expensive Microsoft upgrades to their cars, which would make their cars run much slower and an Apple update would stop the Microsoft bit for a fortnight.

And then Google……

• Will give you a car for nothing
• It will take you where you don’t want to go
• It will only park where its not convenient
• Your Google Car will look like everyone else’s so you wont be able to find where it parked itself.
• It will occasionally move where its parked if you aren’t watching it.
• Will want to crash with Microsoft and Apple Cars
• You won’t find any mechanics anywhere to help with problems, but they usually come with a mate down the pub who knows not much more than you but is considered an expert.
• It will have one seat but a paid for upgrade will get you a total of 1.5 seats  so you have to buy three upgrades for the average family
• It won’t have a standard entertainment system but will play old black and white TV programs and makeup tutorials from Youtube, usually featuring cats.
• There will be plenty of controls but you wont ever find where they are.
• All the Chrome will be much heavier than normal and  make the car much slower
• Occasionally you will go out on your drive to find your car unavailable for a few hours, this will be called an “outage” and will happen at the most inconvenient time. You will accept this as normal for a free car or cloud car.
• Your car can be used easily by other people.
• No one will consider your Google car as a real car, especially Apple and Microsoft drivers.
• You will be able to drive your car anywhere, over seas and all lands even if there are no roads.
• If it sees a face or name outside it will immediately pixellate the windscreen.
• Google car owners think everyone is a moron, even other Google car owners but cats are cool.

If Blackberry made cars…..

• There will be no doors to get in
• No one will want one except for US Government operatives who will all own an Apple car as well.

If Nokia made cars…………..

• Every one would have owned at least one, a while ago.
• No one has seen one for years
• People only have a vague memory of what one looked like and then remembered it having square wheels for some unknown reason.
• Nobody mentions its battery life of a week but remembers there was no colour.

Finally if there were Open Source cars

• They would be free
• You could easily modify your car
• You will never need to replace it
• Owners will be called Nerds or Geeks unlike Apple devotees who have no collective name, they are above that even though their cars use Open Source technology.
• Microsoft will open claim they love Open Source cars while making sure they won’t work in Redmond or surrounding areas.
• There are millions of Open Source users and mechanics all over the world also known as nerds and geeks.
• It would be as individually looking as you wanted
• Have 1 to unlimted seats and the instructions will be in every langauge.
• It would run on anything, petrol, diesel, paraffin, water. sunshine or air with an appropriate add-on
• You can park anywhere for free, even inside  shops and offices.
• You could add anything you ever wanted to a car
• Your own downloaded car would look a bit cluncky but you can change that
• There is a central repository for all improvements call Gitcarhub
• You can upgrade and update your car for ever using Gitcarhub
• The Entertainment system would play Radio, DAB, CD’s MP3, WAV, MP4, cassette, 8-track and 45,33,78 Vinyl.
• It can go on land, sea, underwater and even fly.
• There are plans for interplanetary OS cars
• Every design has a silly name such as OpenCar, Oscar, Priddy Nonesuch, Mr Tibbs etc.
• All Open Source owners would tell everyone their car was best, show it, prove it beyond doubt but everyone will still want an Apple or Microsoft car.
• Feel free to correct, modify or add anything in this category then share it
• Amazon, eBay, Tesco and 300 other companies will all have Open Source cars but no-one will notice.
• No one would want one for birthday or Christmas.
• Open source drivers know that Apple and Microsoft car owners are idiots.

Some of these comments will strike a chord, others will be offended (That’s the world of Political Correctness V2.0 where no one has thick skin, broad shoulders or a sense of humour). Please feel free to share this as long as we get a mention. If you want to talk about all the choices then talk to us we handle everything here, except Blackberry and Nokia (but who does?) So we can give clear unbiased advice for you and your business.

 

Yes, it’s a £million pound note and it exists, not that you will ever see one, they are used to back the money issued by independent UK banks. Small business wastes more than 1000 of these every year by making the wrong decisions when it comes to computers systems & software.

Instead of saving money you can easily be wasting it. We have cut fact from fiction to help you save money and stop wasting it. We will look at what you might easily waste or save over a period of up to six years.

Buying cheaper machines – Waste of £200
You really do get what you pay for. If you buy a cheaper machine you may think you are saving money but you are just buying equipment that is either already old or never going to be fast enough. You will be putting your hand in your pocket every two or three years or suffering for years with inadequate performance. A cheap computer costs about £300 but a good one will be £700 and will last three times as long. Save £200

Windows server – Waste of £9,000
Windows servers used to be good value because you got all the software you wanted from Microsoft but at a cut-down price for small business. If you want it now then it will need to be the powerful stuff that big business buys but with the hardware to suit. Email, Data and SQL with a meaty system will cost you around £12,000. You can get the same out of a Linux server for around £3,000. It uses powerful software that’s virtually free. This is a whole other subject so talk to us to find out more as not every supplier is clever enough to supply it.

Use the cloud – £unlimited waste
Beware the cloud-only salesperson. Using the cloud is just paying to use someone elses computer and if you pay for anything then you are just throwing money away 10 Mailboxes for business cost £6 a month each, that’s £4,320 over six years. It’s the same thing for Accounts, Backup, CRM, HR, It all adds up to a small fortune over time. Years ago there was the computer bureau, they died when people could do their own computing with a PC. The cloud has taken us back in time and up in costs. If you want to spread the cost use leasing. The cloud is good for offsite backup and sharing data but there are usually cheaper ways.

Lease a system – Save – £unlimited
The main reason for using the cloud is to spread the cost but it’s really expensive. With a lease you can spread the cost, saving your cash-flow, and at the end you can still own the equipment without paying any more. You can also save tax which if you can’t do if you buy it outright.

Refurbished equipment – save between £300-£600
Like buying a used car the price of IT equipment drops immediately its out the box. Some top end equipment is only in use for short times and then it becomes available with several years life still in it and usually with a years guarantee. A used Lenovo workstation can save you £300. Laptops are an even bigger saving, you can get a £1200 top end laptop for £400.

Use open source software – Save £unlimited
There are two types of software, they are both branded and commercial but one is owned by shareholders, the other is freely available open source. The difference is that software like Sage will cost you £thousands but open source software is free irrespective of users and size. If you consider that the Government have just endorsed LibreOffice which is a free version of Microsoft Office it might make you look at this option. Like Linux its only the technically capable computer companies that supply it.

Buy full support – Waste £unlimited
Support cost is the reason big companies have their own IT department or else they pay huge sums to support companies. There is a different between the next day support offered by Dell and the full support offered by people like Yellow Hammer. Full support means that you pay whether you use it or not. We offer a ClubClass package, most of the support you get is free and if its going to be a big bill then we give you a 40% discount for being a loyal client.

Extended warranties -Waste £unlimited
This is a bet as big as a lottery ticket. Equipment goes wrong in the first year or in the after the third. The first year is covered by a manufacturers warranty and a 3 year cover only gives you an extra two years, when the item is least likely to go wrong. You would be better getting CMX ClubClass cover, it covers the bits that the extended warranties don’t and it works out cheaper. You can always buy a lottery ticket instead of extended warranty, the chances of winning are usually better than betting on a fault.

Turning off your equipment at night – Save £900 per system
You average computer uses 200 watts but if its left on there is 16 hours a day its doing nothing but burning money. If you turn your systems off and on each day then you will save £900 on a 13p a Kw unit tariff. You can even automate it to turn off and on. The savings with servers is even more and you can save two to three times this amount. WE just add a simple program and some computers will turn themselves on at a pre-set time.

Talking to a single source adviser – Waste unlimited  £900 per system
If you ever want advice you don’t just ask someone who has a single solution, if you were looking for a vehicle you wouldn’t go to a motorbike shop. The salesman will try to sell you what he’s got, not what he hasn’t. A salesman from a single brand of software offers a choice of one, same as a cloud supplier, buy or don’t.

To make a real choice on what is best for you need to talk to people who have the experience and knowledge of all the options, A source who supply everything. Cloud, Hybrid, Hardware, Software, proprietary, Open Source, PC and Apple. That way you will examine all the options and you will know what is waste and what are savings.

CMX business computing is all about getting the right equipment, with the right service at the right price, now and for the future. We put your needs first,  not what makes us the most money, We would rather have a customer for years than make a quick-kill sale and then forget them. That’s why we deal with many solution providers. We don’t have sales people and we offer whole of market not a one product solution.