Keeping up with the Joneses
You're looking a bit pasty around the gills, guv. Touch of the ole torschlusspanik is it? You wot? Don't worry if the boss doesn't understand you, just explain it's one of those less than pithy German phrases to describe the panic borne of closing doors.
For today's subject is change. But in this instance, it's not so much the sound of closing doors that should give rise to anxiety, but the ominous creak of the scaffold hatch opening after the noose has tightened.
As 1998 unfolds, dealers especially can expect to succumb to commercial torschlusspanik as hardware margins plummet and PCs are peddled by a legion of rivals, including your high street butcher. Pound of mince today please, and four ISDN compliant Compaqs. Tell you what missus, make it five and I'll throw in a free virus program for detecting Mad Cow disease.
But it's not just the PC industry that's being rocked by change.
Livingstone Rental, bless its rehirable socks, has just worked out that life cycles for computer hardware have fallen drastically over the last few years, so anyone stocking kit - be it NetPCs, mobile systems or personal handhelds - will find it obsolete within six months.
It's a similar story with software, where before long, the internet is likely to be the main medium for the downloading, configuring and billing of programs, inexorably altering the relationship between primary software developer and the channel.
It's a maelstrom of activity that's unprecedented. If you don't redefine your role within the next 18 months, don't expect to survive. PC manufacturers and distributors are similarly struggling for ways to differentiate. It has led to much talk about the so-called agent model, in which the former supplies the base product, the distributor assembles, and the Var acts as an agent working on commission rather than a percentage. Not such a bad deal when you consider resellers make their wedge mainly from post-sale support, and many find it more expedient to outsource less rewarding tasks such as configuration.
The worry for smaller Vars is that, as the supply chain is re-engineered, they could be left out of the channel assembly equation as distributors and their first-tier resellers hog major deals.
In the US, it's reckoned you need to be a $100 million to $150 million company just to get a table place. Either way it will be a struggle to keep up.
It reminds me of the story of someone who, while drinking in an Aldershot pub with his army brother, saw a soldier whose T-shirt bore the message if I'm running try to keep up. The first guy asked if he was a PE instructor. No, replied his brother, he's in bomb disposal.
The moral of the story - be nippy in 1998 if you don't want to be a casualty when your turf erupts.
Dave Evans is features editor of Computing.