>This is pure, unadulterated nonsense. There are plenty of ways to manage everything you mentioned with a tiered approach to the IT needs of the municipalities of the state without resorting to grossly over accommodating every location. Hell, they could've even used some of that money for regional IT management positions, putting people back to work. Shame on you for justifying this nonsense in any way shape or form. This is textbook waste ala bureaucratic laziness.
And this BS attitude is part of the reason why the US has one of the worst internet infrastructures in the western world. Let's just use what is adequate for today and save some pennies, sure cable internet (or 640K) should be enough for everybody.
Not to mention that you're suggesting micromanaging and needlessly complicating the municipality IT infrastructure for marginal gains (compared to IT staff wages). Not to mention ignoring the "economy of scale" and mass-ordering benefits.
>The benefits from economies of scale and mass-ordering still apply to much lower priced hardware.
If you break the uniformity of the order, to lower priced for some and higher priced for others (for which the lower priced won't do) then you break the economy of scale benefit.
Instead of buying 100 same machines, you then buy a 100 machines of A/B/C etc types. You still buy bulk (within every machine class), but not as "bulk" as before.
Sure, the savings from buying bulk the more expensive unit may not totally offset the savings of buying units with different price points, according to each deployment's specific needs. But uniformity has a lot more benefits, too.
>The IT staff wages will still have to be paid because hardware needs support regardless of the unit price.
Sure, and nobody argued that. What we said is that since the price of the hardware is a drop in the bucket (marginal) compared to the total cost (mainly the IT staff costs), then it doesn't matter. Paying 30,100,000 compared to 30,020,000 is not much of a difference (this one is 0.2%, but even if it was 5-10% it would not matter much).
Also there will be savings in the staff training (the have to only learn one unit), fixing costs, etc.
The most important reason though, is that we are very bad at anticipating future needs in internet infrastructure. Better get something that has a lot of headroom for future needs.
And this BS attitude is part of the reason why the US has one of the worst internet infrastructures in the western world. Let's just use what is adequate for today and save some pennies, sure cable internet (or 640K) should be enough for everybody.
Not to mention that you're suggesting micromanaging and needlessly complicating the municipality IT infrastructure for marginal gains (compared to IT staff wages). Not to mention ignoring the "economy of scale" and mass-ordering benefits.