Recent shipments, however, ranged from 32 Pentium 166 machines for a company in Papeete, French Polynesia through 68 Pentium 200 PCs for a post office box in Luanda, Angola, to a monitor for a lady in Norwich.Because the customer is right there on the other end of the telephone, Gateway can do just-in-time market research. If they want to find out how high a premium a buyer is willing to pay for a special delivery (Christmas Eve is the most popular request), the salespeople just ask the next 20 customers who ring up.They can also gauge when to expect peaks and troughs. Mondays are mayhem (people have had the weekend to read the ads); blizzards are bad for sales (families fret about basics like food and heating), and last year’s national strike in France was brilliant for business, but no one has worked out why.Advertisements are produced in-house, and production staff have their say Senior managers also do their share of customer support. Operations manager Mike Dunne fondly remembers his last stint on the helplines.”A customer was having floppy-disk trouble, so I advised him to take out the disk and close the door. There was a long silence, and I realised he was closing the sitting room door Then a lady rang up to say that her foot pedal didn’t work. I had to explain it was a mouse.”The answer was to label each part of the PC more clearly.
This was put into practice next day, which Dunne says was just in time.. Like cars, computers start to lose value as soon as you buy them. Manufacturers now consider a PC obsolete after between 18 months and two years. As new microprocessors – the heart of a PC – are released, older systems slide down the price bracket.
Three years ago, a PC-compatible with an Intel 80486DX2 chip was top of the range As recently as last Christmas, it was entry-level. Now, scarcely any dealers or mail order companies list a 486 option at all. Intel’s newer 75Mhz Pentium, (the 75MHz refers to the chip’s internal “clock speed”, a guide to relative performance) is now the budget choice. Around 18 months ago, the Pentium 75 was a seriously fast chip. Increasing performance is the raison d’etre of the PC business, so there is never a “best” time to buy Once you decide you need a PC, there are two paths to take The first is to buy the best you can afford.
