Stepping up its efforts to expand its services business, Digital Equipment Corp is ready to announce PC Unity, a complete personal computer procurement and facilities management service that would be paid for on a fixed monthly fee of between $100 and $400 per end-user. Customers have the choice of owning the equipment themselves or having DEC own it, which of course puts the monthly cost up. DEC would supply or procure the personal computers and software and maintain them. The company reckons that the charges reflect the true lifetime costs of managing a personal computer and its software in business today – Gartner Group Inc puts the five-year cost to a business of owning a personal computer at $41,000, up from $19,000 in 1987, and Forrester Research puts the cost of support for one machine at well over $3,000 a year.
