Investments vs. expenses

Last week a member of my club and I were discussing the advantages of newest TV/Monitor technologies and the many differences between brand names and mainly display capabilities between LCD, Plasma and LED developments. All in all a very healthy and enlightening discussion; you can nowadays go to any big chain store and find the three type of technologies side by side, compare them and come up with the best value (i.e. price/features), personal likes, and business fits.

At one point during the chat, she said something like “we just invested in a nice 50 inch plasma ...”. I did not pay much attention to the sentence. However, later that day I kept thinking about the 'invested' word used in such a conversation. It was somehow awkward to hear it, perhaps because she changed the word from bought to invested in at the last second; and mostly because such scenario was not in any way, er… truth.

So, how do we differentiate between expenses and investments? I've read countless books and articles and still am confused about what really represents and investment and what is simply money that needs to be spent in order to continue our business/life. I would say everything we put resources in so that we will complete a package or product to be delivered to another entity is in fact an investment. However, cars? Computers? TVs? Yes, we need them to do our work, some more than the others, but all of those items only depreciate through time; there is no way for me to say “I invested in this car…” because it will NEVER appreciate. It will never return more money than I paid for it. It becomes in fact, a tool, an asset, an active.

So, where do we draw the line? Very gray area indeed. However, what I’m doing now before spending any money –or time- on anything is think about whether such item is an expense or an investment.

Back to watching my expensive TV now.

Technical training

I attended a 2-day event last week. The purpose of such was to “train” people on new or latest technologies and show what's coming down the pipe.

The topics were varied and the organization allowed attendees to choose from a variety of tracks throughout the day. I was in three different tracks; some of the topics were very technical and fast, non-understandable for the regular Joe, while others were simpler and better explained in the allotted time.

On my calculations, the number of attendees was around 800. During the presentations, on breaks between speakers, and at lunch time I spoke to some fellow technicians, engineers, consultants, contractors, business owners and such.
In the entire 2 days and despite my best efforts to pull information about it nobody touched on the business side of the -mmhh- business. The focus was on software, and the boxes that can use that software, and the interconnections between such boxes and so on...
But no Business Case. No comparison tables. No white papers on case studies –beta or not-. No ROI graphs.

Now don't get me wrong, on average it was good and most of the speakers knew their stuff and delivered very good sessions. However, there was nothing but tech talk all thru the event. There was mentioning obviously on companies already using this and that; and real demonstrations on existing systems working and so on.
However, I felt there was this need to know the appropriate application of all these new toys to real world cases; in brief I think I was expecting more than what they can really deliver. Or perhaps I wanted them to do my work: analyze technologies and crunch numbers to come up with such documents.

I might had simply made a mistake on the training and signed up for something I did not need or want.

Oh! Well... I will wait for such thing to come to my town.

Hope you do enjoy your events.