One of the advantages of a small company is that there are loads less "invisible costs" to figuring out what's most economic -- making decisions more closely match the ones you'd make for your own household. Need a new box? If I were buying at home, I'd throw an AMD XP into an nForce2 motherboard with twin RAM sticks, put it in a case, and grab some castaway drives for it. Voila. Cheap.

At a large company, forget that. You need to have a box from the supplier with whom support works best to lessen the load on your internal IT staff. You need to keep pieces relatively standard so that driver issues are pretty regulated. There's all sorts of stuff that, at a small scale, simply aren't costs. And then you've got coordination to worry about -- a hidden cost just for figuring out what the hidden costs are. So then you get slow responses or overly high hardware costs and, contrary to popular belief, worse return on your dollar than you'd get at a small company.

Anyhow, just today's random insight.