No. See below.
This sounds like you've picked up a trade magazine, circa 1990, and
read the business column. "Compatibility", in classic terms hasn't
been an issue in years. Gettting 4 cards (Ethernet, a sound card, a
CDrom reader controller card and a SCSI card (for a scanner) running
was impossible in 1991. Any 3 of those was just very, very hard, and
you had problems supporting this configutarion in the field.
Substuting a different model card and you'd have to start from
scratch. PCI, PNP, and interrupt sharing have made a big improvement.
I recently heard that IBM is getting out of the PC business but never
heard who's making the boxes that have their label. I know that in
the late 90's retail HP and either Compaq or IBM (don't remember
which) PCs came off the same build-to order assembly line, which was a
third party. Same components, different BIOS flash, front panel and
labels. It sort of doesn't matter who makes the box. It's the brand's
reputation and warranty contract.
"tier 1" has always meant (to me) that the manufacturer would provide
a consistant business-grade model for years, and not drop, change, or
upgrade a component (like the video card) without lots of advance
notice to the corporate customers. It meant that the manufacturer's
field repair force would replace a dead mobo or card with the exact
model and revision level. With retail computers the warranty says that
they only have to provide a part that's on the Microsoft campatibility
list. Prior to PNP hardware consistancey was critica. When you own
10,000 DOS-based PCs you worry about these things. These PCs were not
cheap, out of the box, but the real measure is cost of ownership over
3-5 years, and time to get the user back in operation after a failure,
and the ability to remotly support these people. Now that we use
Ghost for imaging our corporate machines we really fuss over vendor's
product line changes. We tend to skip model changes and only change
when the manufacturer is about to stop making the old one. This is a
problem with laptops because the manufacturer makes a new model every
90 days. We like Dell and Toshiba (we own thousands of laptops for our
field force.)
I don't consider Sony a tier 1 manufacturer based on the above, and
have never seen them on anyone's list of corporate computers. Looking
at the Aug 5 '03 issue of PC Magazine, which has the annual owner
satisfaction survey results, Sony doesn't even get a spot in the "work
Computer" catagory. It's only in the "Home" catagory. In that
catagory people like their machines but it rates completely average in
all support catagories. That would keep it off the short list on a
corporate selection process. Sony knows their market.
I'm a big fan of "white box" PCs for small business use as long as I
can give the builder a bill of materials so I know and control what's
in the box. I have a couple of storefronts dealers that I have a very
good relationship with. You can't roll out more than a few machines at
a time unless you use Ghost, or similar, and that requires identical
hardware.
?? Your questions seem out of tune to me.
There's no "clones" at all since there isn't anything to clone. IBM
was left out of the loop and in the dust since the 286 AT. Companies
like Microsoft, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, VIA, ATI, Asus, Phoenix-Award
define and control the PC architecture today. If anything, it's IBM
and Compaq that is cloning the open PC today, because they can no
longer sell their proprietary shit.
As far as I'm concerned, I treat laptops as completly proprietary from
a OS install and hardware standpoint but I haven't seen an application
compatibility problem in them.
Are you speaking about laptops? - Toshiba!
For desktops, The really big lesson the last decade is not to buy
brand name. Small custom PC-builders build the best equipment. That's
how Dell and Gateway started and it's still where you find the best
builders, using the best value- and most compatible components.
That's great for a home computer but even there, Dell is competitive
if you want a legal software bundle and 24x7 phone support for a
year.
