Just suppose that, within one randomly-selected software manufacturing house, there was a technical department consisting of a dozen individuals. Despite the technical nature of the company in general, these twelve people were by far the most knowledgeable of the employees, since they were required to test new products and provide telephone support to customers.

One day, fed up with attempting to test graphics software on a 14-inch screen, one of the twelve technicians filled in a product requisition form, handed it to the accounts department and ordered a shiny new 17-inch display, without much hope of it being authorised. But a few days later a package arrived for him, containing a 17-inch monitor. He saw that this was good. And, when he placed it on his desk in order to make his colleagues jealous, they saw that it was good, too. And ordered another eleven.

A few weeks later, tired of the regular appearance of the hourglass mouse pointer, a different technician decided it was time for a new PC. A Pentium II, 266MHz, 64MB of RAM and a 4GB hard drive should do the trick, he thought, filling in the magic form and crossing his fingers. A week later, his new PC arrived, and he took great delight in showing all his colleagues how fast it was at running important applications like Quake II and his Playboy screen-saver. Much grumbling was heard from the other technicians, but they comforted themselves by ordering several new 300MHz Pentium II systems, each with 128MB of memory. To be fair, these new machines did load Word three seconds faster than the old ones, so it was a worthwhile investment.

By mistake, one of the new systems arrived with a DAT drive. This was of no use whatsoever to any of the twelve technicians (in fact its interface cable wasn't even connected), but the one who had it spent much of his time loading and ejecting DAT tapes, just so that his colleagues could hear the satisfying 'whirr-click' noise that it made. Inevitably, eleven other DAT drives were soon on their way.

One of the office managers, mildly confused and alarmed by this sudden surge of outgoing money, asked the twelve if all this new equipment was really necessary. He was told, in no uncertain terms, "With the IRQ utilisation of the latest product range? Can you think of an alternative test methodology that would give us structured analysis in a proactive and fully-leveraged environment?" and he wandered away, happy that all was well.

The latest purchase is a quad-450MHz processor system with half a gigabyte of RAM, a 21-inch monitor and five 9GB hard drives, along with a video capture card, DVD drive, 3D accelerator and several removable storage drives. Its purpose? To check the operation of a new, consumer-oriented e-mail client designed for entry-level systems. When it was pointed out to him that quad-processor systems are of no use under Windows 95, the technician who ordered this new system paused for a second or two, then replied "Oh well, it'll help keep the office warm in Winter".

So the next time you read that customer demand is driving the development of faster processors, bigger hard drives and higher-capacity memory chips, take it with a pinch of salt. And remember; knowledge is a wonderful thing.