Whilst there is not always a direct correlation between price and quality, when it comes to business needs, there is often greater value in paying for a quality product rather than saving pennies which cost pounds.

The principle is similar to Vrimes’ Boots Theory, which states that the person who buys cheap boots will spend more in the long run than the person who spends a little more to buy high-quality ones that will last them a lot longer.

The same is true with IT services and equipment; there are computers available for extraordinarily low costs but often need replacing to keep them viable for business uses.

Some of them, such as the Raspberry Pi cost less than £100 per unit, but at the same time, they suffer from relatively limited processing power, poor support for business purposes and a lack of compatibility.

Whilst specifications may not seem to matter, they often contribute to considerable startup times which can over the course of a year cost a company hours, days and potentially months in lost work-hours depending on the size of the company.

Saving pennies costs pounds in terms of lost productivity, and there is one very illustrative example of just how costly trying to be cheap can be.

The SoftRAM Scam

Most computers have a choke point of some kind, where a hardware component is slower or weaker relative to the rest and limits the overall performance of the machine and by extension anyone who uses it for business.

This can be the central processing unit (CPU), the graphical processing unit (GPU) or the random access memory (RAM), and often the best long-term solution is upgrading one or all of these pieces where possible.

Of course, buying new components and hiring IT technicians to physically install them can be somewhat expensive, but is often necessary and tends to pay for itself in the long run.

In the 1990s, the need for hardware upgrades was, if anything, even more acute with the increasing popularity of Windows 3.1 and the extremely successful launch of Windows 95 for business.

The latter was, at the time, particularly infamous for requiring as much as four times the RAM many computers had at the time at a minimum. The recommendation would be eight times that, something that was far more costly back then than it is now.

The idea was that it used memory compression tools and virtual memory to increase the usable memory space for applications and avoid the annoying “out of memory errors” and associated blue screens of death that were already an issue for Windows 3.1 users.

This is where Syncronys Softcorp entered the market with a system that cost just £50, required no hardware upgrades but could potentially double the usable RAM in the computer, making it more stable, able to run more intensive software and save businesses a fortune.

There were several problems with the software. The first is that a lot of what the software claimed to do was very easy to accomplish by someone who was knowledgeable enough to alter system settings for free.

The bigger problem is that it did not even try to do what it claimed to do, as was discovered by the German magazine Magazin für Computertechnik (Magazine for Computer Technology, often known simply as “c’t”) in a famous expose that accused SoftRAM of being a “placebo”.

Much like how the placebo effect might make a sugar pill appear to have a greater effect than it is, SoftRAM simply lied to users that the system was running faster. Benchmark tests found that it was no quicker than a standard system with the same specifications and stole space from the hard disk to do so.

This led to an investigation by the United States Federal Trade Commission, which quickly found that the claims were false and even if they weren’t, SoftRAM did not have any reasonable basis to make the claims.

This quickly led to a settlement, a recall of the software and $10 rebates to anyone in the United States who had bought the software and requested them, although this did not stop several individual legal cases from being filed.

This was not the last time Synchroys would sell a system feature for a price, but their final piece of software, a downgrader called UpgradeAID 98, would not sell, and other similar tools would cause the company to declare bankruptcy in 1998.

All of this highlights the importance of choosing IT tools and infrastructure with a long-term view.