End of Software, The: Finding Security, Flexibility, and Profit in the On Demand Future

And Then There's the Training

Even if you can swallow the cost of buying the new software and upgrading your boxes to run it, you must also consider personnel costs. The CAD specialists we've been talking about might need 4–8 hours of instruction (at $30–$40 per hour) to learn the software's new capabilities. Chris Barron, AIA (vice president of architecture for Graphisoft) recommends budgeting for training costs at two times the price of the software upgrade. Putting new features into practice takes even more time. “You take your production person, who is running 80 miles an hour and cut them back to 50 miles an hour [while they learn to use the upgrade],” says Horta. “Do that across the whole office, and it's a sizable cost. A company may not ...