@Carnival-Boy said:
The way I look at it, HP build PCs in Eastern Europe where they pay staff a pittance (at least they used to, I guess they might be assembled in China now), they have hugely beneficial agreements with Microsoft on the licencing, and massive buying power for all the components and yet they still can't sell them to me and make any money which is why they've been trying to sell their PC business for years. If they were making huge margins I might think I can get some of the action, but they're doing all this for me for pretty much no profit. I'm happy to leave them to it..
That's a great way to look at it. They have huge scale in parts, huge scale for MS licensing agreements and the ability to source everything from locations that cost far less than "in house" IT will cost. And their margins are effectively zero. You can leverage that scale or you can do everything yourself.
If you have internal bench services, pay them minimum wage and keep them busy around the clock.... you still can't match the cost that the big vendors have. If you want the people assembling your computers to have any skill, get paid a reasonable amount (more than a gas station attendant) and to do so in high cost locations (like anywhere in the US or UK) then you can't match the prices or come anywhere close. And heaven forbid that you have any moment where the tasks for the bench are not completely repetitive and predictable or that they are not kept 100% busy. Then it really all falls apart.
