If you've been in the computer consulting business for a while, you know that influencing product selection is one of the more valuable services that your firm performs for its client base.

Your clients depend on your firm to guide them toward reliable, cost-effective technology solutions. Along the same lines, your clients count on your firm to help them steer clear of "lemons", or IT support "quicksand" in their IT spending.

IT Spending: Newly Released Technology is Often Not a Smart Purchase

If the first year's depreciation cost of IT spending on the latest and greatest PC hardware doesn't deter your clients, this might. If your clients purchase PCs with processors that have just been released, new kind of motherboards, revolutionary kinds of graphics accelerators or updated chipsets, they may get some very unpleasant surprises.

IT Spending: Your Clients May Blame You

Clients generally don't like unreliable PC hardware. Many clients will even blame you, the highly paid computer consultant. Peeved clients with major hardware headaches can be huge threat to your firm's survival.

Protect your clients' IT spending plan and your company's future by being very careful when it comes to being an early adopter with bleeding-edge PC hardware.

IT Spending: Shielding Your Clients from Early Adopter Risks

As the PC industry continues to experience unprecedented financial pressures, a lot more products are being rushed to market prematurely.In early 2001, leading IT market research firm Gartner Dataquest, announced that the U.S. PC market shrank by 3.5 percent, compared to the same period a year earlier. This was the first industry contraction in seven years.

One only can wonder if as the hardware giants reduce headcount, expenses and R&D, will consumers become their extended R&D facility? This revelation is really nothing new to the PC industry.

IT Spending: It Takes Time to Fully Test New Products

For at least a decade, PC owners and small businesses have had to consider their IT spending with a continuous stream of updated hardware device driver software and reprogrammable firmware updates.

The trouble is, from the time problems are first reported, analyzed, diagnosed and ultimately fixed through updates, your clients have to suffer with unreliable hardware products. If you're looking to help clients control their IT spending, you don't want your clients to be a hardware vendor's guinea pig.

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