Banishing the PC upgrade blues

By Steve Malone

Posted on 5 Sep 2002 at 09:43

Industry giants are getting increasingly queasy at the time it takes companies and individuals to upgrade the computers they bought at the height of the millennium bug boom in 1999. In order to lower the barriers to buy new machines some of the biggest names in the PC market have joined together to form the PC Migration Workgroup.

Among the companies involved are Intel, Microsoft, Laplink and Symantec. The aim of the group is to ease the pain of getting up and running on a new computer by transferring settings and data from their old PC.

Currently, according to industry analysis firm Gartner, it costs around $250 for large company to upgrade a user to a new computer. This includes technical support and downtime whilst the hapless user fiddles with their email, instant messaging and other settings to get everything working again. At a time when the purse strings on IT budgets are still firmly shut, this kind of expense is something that managers feel they can easily shuffle off to sometime in the future.

All of which will be concerning the partners in the Workgroup. Intel has already hinted that its forecasts for Q3 are more likely to be at the pessimistic end rather than the optimistic end. Companies which have had their arms twisted by Microsoft to sign up to its subscription based upgrade programme, are going to want to demand a decent service as they do upgrade and that means migrating to new PCs as well. Laplink sees an opportunity in the home computer market to become the standard method of squirting settings between the old computer and the new and Symantec will want to mitigate the seemingly endless process of getting the latest virus signatures on new machines.

The initial goals of the group will be tub thumping to let the world at large know about existing migration solutions (i.e. the partners own) and to get other ISVs into line. Going forward the group expects to work together to develop solutions to make the migration easier so that users no longer have to set aside half a day to get back to the position they were before they moved machines.