Thin client applications can seldom run within a computer browser

CHAPTER 4 Hardware, Software, and Mobile Systems

Jason Green, CEO of AllRoad Parts, is meeting with the committee he asked to investigate the 3D printing opportunity. Committee members Kelly Summers, CFO; Lucas Massey, IT director; Drew Mills, operations manager; and Addison Lee, head of purchasing, are with him around a conference table.

Jason starts the meeting.

“First, I have to thank Drew for all the hard work he put into setting up the new printer, experimenting with it, and teaching us about the reality of 3D printing. We’re not manufacturers, 3D technology won’t give us the processes and IS we need, and the parts we could produce may not stand up to the rough treatment offroading involves. So, now we know that 3D printing isn’t for us … at least not right now.”

There’s a pause in the conversation, and then Kelly speaks up. “Well, we all agree about that, but we do think that, as a supplier, there is something related to 3D printing that we could sell to our customers.”

Jason is curious; that’s not what he expected Kelly to say. “OK, I’ll bite,” he says. “What is it?”

“Designs,” she replies. “Part designs. We don’t want to manufacture parts because we don’t want to get into the quality issues that Drew identified, but our customers might want to manufacture parts on their own 3D printers.”

“You mean sell 3D-ready part designs as a product?” Jason sounds dubious.

“Exactly,” Kelly shoots back.

“Who’s gonna want to print their own parts? I don’t see Dad making bike parts for his kids …” Jason trails off.

“No, probably not,” Drew chimes in, “but I did a quick query on past orders, and there are customers who order large quantities of particular products. They’re mostly service shops. Anyway, larger customers like that could make parts for themselves. Or make them for Dad to install on his kids’ bikes.”

“Hmm. Seems like a stretch to me,” says Jason. “First of all, can we get the rights to sell the plans? Second, even if we can, why wouldn’t our customers buy the plans directly from the manufacturer?”

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“Well, they might, but we already deal with a similar problem.” Drew continues, “Our customers can buy anything that we sell straight from Fox. But they don’t. Like we always say, our huge inventory provides one-stop shopping for all their parts.”

“Besides, there’s something else to consider here,” Lucas speaks up. “If you call a manufacturer to order a part, what do they ask for first? The part number. When our customers call in, they say something like, ‘I want the little green plastic gizmo that goes next to big black round thing that’s right above the fork.’ It drives the manufacturers crazy.”

“Yeah, you don’t have to tell me,” Jason replies. “That’s what makes our sales costs so high.”

“So, here’s what we do,” says Lucas. “We create an app—maybe just a browser app, or maybe we have to do a native app, I’m not sure yet—but the app allows customers to search for the vehicles they want to service. They click on the major system for which they need parts. We know from our orders which parts each customer is most likely to order, so we highlight them. Customers click or tap on the highlighted area and keep driving down until they find the part they need. They click that part, and we offer to sell them the part if we have it in inventory or the 3D-ready file if they want to make it themselves.”

This example refocuses Jason on sales costs. “Lucas, why aren’t we already doing this for our in-inventory parts? It seems like a good way to reduces sales costs,” he says.

“Lucas and I have been talking about this for some time,” Addison retorts. “But building the app is expensive, and our margins on our in-inventory parts support high sales costs. So, we never brought it to you.”

STUDY QUESTIONS

· Q1 What do business professionals need to know about computer hardware?

· Q2 What do business professionals need to know about software?

· Q3 Is open source software a viable alternative?

· Q4 What are the differences between native and thin-client applications?

· Q5 Why are mobile systems increasingly important?

· Q6 What characterizes quality mobile user experiences?

· Q7 What are the challenges of personal mobile devices at work?

· Q8 2024?

“But,” Lucas picks up Addison’s line of thought, “the prices we can charge for selling part designs are so low that we’ll lose money if customers are calling and speaking to sales reps for help. Sales labor costs will eat up any possible margins. So, design sales need an app like this.”

Jason is intrigued. “How expensive is the app?” he asks.

“That depends on whether we do a thin-client app or a native app,” replies Lucas. “It also depends on how much open source we can get.”

“Here we go again,” Jason grumbles. “And if we do a native app, we have to do iOS and an Android version and maybe a Win 8 version … And do we do it in-house or off-shore? Yada yada. It seems like we’re always having this conversation.”

“Yup, it does,” Lucas agrees.

“OK,” Jason sighs. “Bring me a proposal, and let’s see what we can do. And … good work, Kelly, to you and your team.”

Jason leaves the room, muttering to himself, “Android, smandroid. Riding bikes was fun. Maybe I could have made it riding the professional circuit?”

CHAPTER PREVIEW

What would you do if you were Drew? Or Kelly? How hard is it to build the new application? How much should it cost? How should they proceed? Is Lucas too conservative? If you’re wondering why, as a future business professional, you need to know about hardware and software, think about those questions. Those and others of greater complexity—most likely ones involving technology that will be invented between now and the time you start working—will come your way.

You don’t need to be an expert. You don’t need to be a hardware engineer or a computer programmer. You do need to know enough, however, to be an effective consumer. You need the knowledge and skills to ask important, relevant questions and understand the answers.

We begin with basic hardware and software concepts. Next, we will discuss open source software development and then investigate the differences between native and thin-client applications. Following that, we’ll discuss the importance of mobile systems and the characteristics of quality mobile user experiences. Employees are increasingly bringing their computers to work, which creates new challenges, as you’ll learn in Q7. Finally, we’ll wrap up by forecasting trends in hardware and software in 2024.

Q1 What Do Business Professionals Need to Know About Computer Hardware?

Computer hardware consists of electronic components and related gadgetry that input, process, output, and store data according to instructions encoded in computer programs or software. All hardware today has more or less the same components, at least to the level that is important to us. We’ll begin with those components and then we’ll quickly survey basic types of computers.

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Hardware Components

Every computer has a central processing unit (CPU) , which is sometimes called “the brain” of the computer. Although the design of the CPU has nothing in common with the anatomy of animal brains, this description is helpful because the CPU does have the “smarts” of the machine. The CPU selects instructions, processes them, performs arithmetic and logical comparisons, and stores results of operations in memory. Some computers have two or more CPUs. A computer with two CPUs is called a dual-processor computer. Quad-processor computers have four CPUs. Some high-end computers have 16 or more CPUs.

Over the course of your career, application software, hardware, and firmware will change, sometimes rapidly. The Guide on pages 148 – 149 challenges you to choose a strategy for addressing this change.

CPUs vary in speed, function, and cost. Hardware vendors such as Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, and National Semiconductor continually improve CPU speed and capabilities while reducing CPU costs (as discussed under Moore’s Law in Chapter 1). Whether you or your department needs the latest, greatest CPU depends on the nature of your work.

The CPU works in conjunction with main memory . The CPU reads data and instructions from memory, and it stores results of computations in main memory. Main memory is sometimes called RAM , for random access memory.

All computers include storage hardware , which is used to save data and programs. Magnetic disks are still the most common storage device, although optical disks such as CDs and DVDs also are popular. Thumb drives are small, portable storage devices that can be used to back up data and transfer it from one computer to another.

Types of Hardware

Figure 4-1 lists the basic types of hardware. Personal computers (PCs) are classic computing devices that are used by individuals. In the past, PCs were the primary computer used in business. Today, they are gradually being supplanted by tablets and other mobile devices. The Mac Pro is an example of a modern PC. Apple brought tablets (sometimes called slates ) to prominence with the iPad. In 2012, Microsoft announced Surface and Google announced the Nexus series, all tablets. Smartphones are cell phones with processing capability; the Motorola (now owned by Google) Droid is a good example. Today, because it’s hard to find a cell phone that isn’t smart, people often just call them phones.

A server is a computer that is designed to support processing from many remote computers and users. You can think of a server as a PC on steroids. As a business professional, you probably will not be involved in the choice of server hardware. As of 2013, a good example is the Dell PowerEdge server. Finally, a server farm is a collection of, typically, thousands of servers. (See Figure 4-2.) Server farms are often placed in large truck trailers that hold 5,000 servers or more. Typically a trailer has two large cables coming out of it; one is for power and the other is for data communications. The operator of the farm backs a trailer into a pre prepared slab (in a warehouse or sometimes out in the open air), plugs in the power and communications cables, and voilà, thousands of servers are up and running!

Figure 4-2 Server Farm

Source: © Andrew Twort/Alamy

Increasingly, server infrastructure is delivered as a service in what is termed the cloud. We will discuss cloud computing in Chapter 6, after you have some knowledge of data communications. PCs, tablets, and smartphones that access servers and the cloud are called clients .

The capacities of computer hardware are specified according to data units, which we discuss next.

Computer Data

Computers represent data using binary digits , called bits . A bit is either a zero or a one. Bits are used for computer data because they are easy to represent physically, as illustrated in Figure 4-3. A switch can be either closed or open. A computer can be designed so that an open switch represents zero and a closed switch represents one. Or the orientation of a magnetic field can represent a bit: magnetism in one direction represents a zero; magnetism in the opposite direction represents a one. Or, for optical media, small pits are burned onto the surface of the disk so that they will reflect light. In a given spot, a reflection means a one; no reflection means a zero.

Computer Data Sizes

Figure 4-3 Bits Are Easy to Represent Physically

All forms of computer data are represented by bits. The data can be numbers, characters, currency amounts, photos, recordings, or whatever. All are simply a string of bits. For reasons that interest many but are irrelevant for future managers, bits are grouped into 8-bit chunks called bytes . For character data, such as the letters in a person’s name, one character will fit into one byte. Thus, when you read a specification that a computing device has 100 million bytes of memory, you know that the device can hold up to 100 million characters.

Bytes are used to measure sizes of noncharacter data as well. Someone might say, for example, that a given picture is 100,000 bytes in size. This statement means the length of the bit string that represents the picture is 100,000 bytes or 800,000 bits (because there are 8 bits per byte).

The specifications for the size of main memory, disk, and other computer devices are expressed in bytes. Figure 4-4 shows the set of abbreviations that are used to represent data storage capacity. A kilobyte , abbreviated K , is a collection of 1,024 bytes. A megabyte , or MB , is 1,024 kilobytes. A gigabyte , or GB , is 1,024 megabytes; a terabyte , or TB , is 1,024 gigabytes; a petabyte , or PB , is 1,024 terabytes; and an exabyte , or EB , is 1,024 petabytes. Sometimes you will see these definitions simplified as 1K equals 1,000 bytes and 1MB equals 1,000K, etc. Such simplifications are incorrect, but they do ease the math.

Specifying Hardware with Computer Data Sizes

Computer disk capacities are specified according to the amount of data they can contain. Thus, a 500GB disk can contain up to 500GB of data and programs. There is some overhead, so it is not quite 500GB, but it’s close enough.

Buying hardware can be tricky and expensive whether you are buying for personal or company use. Consumers can now check out a new computer at a traditional brick-and-mortar store and take the hardware for a test drive and then purchase online. Is this “showrooming” ethical? Read the Ethics Guide on pages 132 – 133 and decide.

You can purchase computers with CPUs of different speeds. CPU speed is expressed in cycles called hertz. In 2013, a slow personal computer has a speed of 1.5 Gigahertz. A fast personal computer has a speed of 3+ Gigahertz, with dual processors. As predicted by Moore’s Law, CPU speeds continually increase.

Additionally, CPUs today are classified as 32-bit or 64-bit. Without delving into the particulars, a 32-bit is less capable and cheaper than a 64-bit CPU. The latter can address more main memory; you need a 64-bit processor to effectively use more than 4GB of memory. 64-bit processors have other advantages as well, but they are more expensive than 32-bit processors.

An employee who does only simple tasks such as word processing does not need a fast CPU; a 32-bit, 1.5 Gigahertz CPU will be fine. However, an employee who processes large, complicated spreadsheets or who manipulates large database files or edits large picture, sound, or video files needs a fast computer like a 64-bit, dual processor with 3.5 Gigahertz or more. Employees whose work requires them to use many large applications at the same time need 4 GB or more of RAM. Others can do with less.

One last comment: The cache and main memory are volatile , meaning their contents are lost when power is off. Magnetic and optical disks are nonvolatile , meaning their contents survive when power is off. If you suddenly lose power, the contents of unsaved memory—say, documents that have been altered—will be lost. Therefore, get into the habit of frequently (every few minutes or so) saving documents or files that you are changing. Save your documents before your roommate trips over the power cord.

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Q2 What Do Business Professionals Need to Know About Software?

As a future manager or business professional, you need to know the essential terminology and software concepts that will enable you to be an intelligent software consumer. To begin, consider the basic categories of software shown in Figure 4-5.

Operating systems can become infected with malware. Read the Security Guide on pages 146 – 147 to learn more.

Every computer has an operating system (OS) , which is a program that controls that computer’s resources. Some of the functions of an operating system are to read and write data, allocate main memory, perform memory swapping, start and stop programs, respond to error conditions, and facilitate backup and recovery. In addition, the operating system creates and manages the user interface, including the display, keyboard, mouse, and other devices.

Although the operating system makes the computer usable, it does little application-specific work. If you want to check the weather or access a database, you need application programs such as an iPad weather application or Oracle’s customer relationship management (CRM) software.

Both client and server computers need an operating system, though they need not be the same. Further, both clients and servers can process application programs. The application’s design determines whether the client, the server, or both, process it.