Financial & Travel Musings

These days many small software firms specialise in niche markets essentially tailoring off the shelf software to the needs of companies within their niche. That works fine if your needs are fairly standard and it’s a very economical way to go but what if your needs don’t fit neatly into some vertical niche market?

That’s where custom software comes into play. With bespoke software basically you can ask for anything although obviously that flexibility comes with a cost and, sometimes, a substantial one.

However, regardless of the upfront price of your software solution, it’s worth considering the ongoing cost of maintenance and upgrades with bespoke software. Whilst with standard software it’s simply a matter of paying up for the latest upgrade, in the case of bespoke software you’ll generally need to specify your requirements as they change and, eventually, the software may need to be rewritten (allow for this cropping up after no more than 10 years).

Popularity: 5% [?]

Isn’t it odd how we can sometimes get particularly attached to a piece of technology?

I’m sure there are still a few people around who still fondly remember the Model T Ford which was the car that really started the motoring habit around the world. Just think that without that we’d not have McDonalds!

Even now I’d still quite fancy having my own PDP-8 since it was the first computer that I really got to know. Sure, it’s seriously outdated but even so. Would you believe a maximum memory of the equivalent of 48k bytes and 2MB of disc space was enough to support 11 users simultaneously?

However, even the humble compact flash card has a place in my heart if only because it’s so similar to the little memory cards that Mr Spock was forever shuffling in and out of the computer in Star Trek.

My current favourite item of technology is the Acer Aspire One that I’m typing this on now. It’s so cute that I’m expecting to keep it around for long after I would ordinarily have replaced it. This is the computer that really gives the phrase “portable computer” a proper meaning. Sure, it’s not so fast as its bigger siblings but it only adds a second to load times for the wordprocessor or whatever and, let’s face it, all computers have long since become far faster than we really need them to be. It wasn’t that many years ago that you’d never have thought that a computer would ever be fast enough to place full screen video but this little baby hasn’t a problem with it.

Isn’t it peculiar the technological items that we get attached to?

Popularity: 25% [?]

It used to be that specialised printers were exclusively the domain of the professionals but that’s not been the case for quite a long time now.

Commonplace are the photo printers which can roll off the prints that you’d ordinarily have had to go to the camera shop to have done and the prices for those are now so low that they make DIY a very cost effective and simple way to produce your holiday prints. Also moving into the mainstream are less common types such as the receipt printer which you’d normally encounter in supermarkets but which are handy add-ons for even the smallest business these days.

Although, in principle, you could buy one printer and use it for all these tasks clearly it’s a whole lot simpler to get the specialised printers for their specific tasks and it’s finally become a fairly economic option.

Popularity: 26% [?]