Lenovo’s move to introduce a consumer line of PCs may be winning the company some attention at the Consumer Electronics Show this week. It positions Lenovo, which bought out IBM’s PC division a few years ago, to go head-to-head with other PC makers that sell to the consumer market such as Hewlett-Packard and Dell.
At the same time it may irk some solution providers out there. Those solution providers are the ones who will be going into their small business customers’ offices one rainy Monday morning soon to find the shiny new consumer PCs sitting on a formerly standardized network.
“They come preloaded with tons of junk that businesses don’t need,” said MJ Shoer, president and virtual CTO at Jenaly Technology Group. “By the time you upgrade the PC and remove all that is unnecessary, the business would often have been better off if they just purchased the business class PC to begin with. Also, the rapid changing of components in the consumer lines leads to a real lack of standardization and more complex support requirements.”