Over the past couple of months I’ve been finding people dropping off misbehaving Windows boxes on my doorstep to be tamed by my unique methods of sysadmin discipline. The street-level buzz must be positive as they keep coming and no one ever balks at my fees. But does this mean I’m under-pricing my services? Worth an investigation…

It is an interesting position that I find myself in, particularly since a year ago I wholesale abandoned Windows at home and attempt to find every possible reason to recommend alternatives to people asking for help–usually Apple products but for the more adventurous I let them take a spin with my Ubuntu powered laptop. And now, I find myself not having as much passion for the argument that Microsoft should improve their product as it would mean less requests for my services. A difficult position indeed.

It would seem that the rate of PC purchases over the past several years has reached a critical point that makes the boutique service market viable again. In the 80’s when PCs were a hobby stores catering to that market boomed but died off in the latter part of the decade, however, it would appear that they are making a comeback but in a slightly different incarnation. The new breed of owner-operated stores are more focused on fee-for-service and are blossoming around the fact that Windows based machines are impossibly easy to cripple.

In town we have one such store and while you do not see much foot traffic they have conspicuously placed their test bench in the front window, as a display of their technical prowess, and their is no shortage of aging Dell, Gateway, and eMachine boxes rotating through. Like me, I am sure much of their business centers around the average user who has reached a point where they cannot keep their computer operation, for whatever reason. OSes are like modern cars in that changing the oil yourself is now a real undertaking–I can’t even find the oil filter on Management’s 2006 Corolla–and with the proliferation of malware and the daily uncovering of new security exploits keeping a Windows PC operation requires dedicated time and resources.

So, even as the local IT industry continues it meltdown it is likely that I can still find some side work keeping peoples computers operational, provided that Redmond continues to ship Alpha code. So on behalf of the local computer support industry and myself, please continue clicking every pop up, surfing for porn, and installing each and every toolbar you can find. We thank each and everyone of you for it because without you we wouldn’t be in business.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 4th, 2006 at 10:09 am and is filed under Editorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.