Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!ENCORE.COM!bzs From: bzs@ENCORE.COM (Barry Shein) Newsgroups: comp.society.futures Subject: Downsizing Message-ID: <8811300409.AA13002@multimax.encore.com> Date: 30 Nov 88 04:09:53 GMT Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 25 There's an interesting article in this week's Computerworld about "Downsizing" and how it seems to be the doom of MIS types who wear expensive suits. Downsizing means replacing your impressive-looking, power-sucking mainframe clunker with a bunch of PC's because the latter actually get the work done faster/better/cheaper. The problem they allude to (and has been approved by FUD, Inc) is now that you are in charge of a bunch of dumb ole PC's who wants to pay you six digits anymore to help folks change floppies and fight christmas tree virii? So they replace you with the boss's pimply 17-year old kid and productivity really goes up (for everyone but you.) Does anyone want to guess at the number of mainframes in this world which could be replaced with a few PC's or workstations or even (ahem) $300K 100MIPS parallel minis*? How about five years from now? I mean really, how much juice do you need to keep track of payroll for 5,000 employees anyhow? But be sure to hide the joysticks when the auditors show up! -Barry Shein, ||Encore|| * A mainframe is any machine which costs $5M or more and no one dares ask why.