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Average Laptop Contents Worth A Million Bucks?
from the somebody-call-ebay dept
An anti-virus and security firm's new study says the contents of the average business laptop is worth nearly a million dollars. Disregarding the firm's obvious bias for a moment, the figure is pretty unbelievable. A childhood spent trading baseball cards taught me that something's worth what somebody will pay you for it, not what a magazine says it's worth -- or in this case, a security company that wants to sell you something. If the stuff inside people's laptops is really that valuable, why aren't they "lost" more often?
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First Expected Moment
If there are enough outliers with millions of dollars worth of data, then it is possible to say that the mean value per laptop is a million.
Of course, a more sensible measure in this instance would be the median value.
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Re: First Expected Moment
That's not the point at all. Carlo is discussing realistic value, not perceived value.
I spent the last couple of weeks in the garage building a cabinet stand. To me, my time and labour are worth a million dollars. Thus I perceieve the stand is worth a million bucks. Doubt I could get more than a couple hundred for it.
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Perceived Value vs Realistic Value
The article talks about how the USERS see the value of their laptop, not how they see the value of another laptop.
It's almost like asking someone how much value do they put on a pet, or heck, even a kid. They may value their child over a billion dollars, but that doesn't mean anyone's going to pay for it. (Minus the sick and perverted)
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Hmmm... I wonder
if they might be interested in buying all of my Jose Canseco rookies?
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its just priceless
contents are just priceless. not like the hope diamond, but where you cant put a price tag on it. "on mans junk is another mans treasure." not everyone can agree on a price for a single laptop's contents.
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Priceless
This sounds like a one of those credit card commercials.
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Re: First Expected Moment
I think it is potentially not too far off. If you think about it, value is not really how much someone is willing to pay for it, but what it costs you to replace it. You've also got to consider that the vast majority of businesses only provide laptops to people who have a business need for them - mainly salesmen and more senior management who travel often. If a salesman goes on a trip, makes a couple of sales, and has all the details of the agreement, etc on his laptop, then loses - it potentially will require him to do the same trip again, potentially lose customers for incompetence, and waste a lot of expensive people's time by working out the details again. Same goes for sales forecasts, business decisions, and anything else. Generally, in large organizations, the people with laptops are also the most technically illiterate and would backup their data least often. I don't think it's an outrageous figure.
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Million dollars of LOSS
Might they mean that if the data is LOST or STOLEN then there is a risk of one million dollars of DAMAGE to the company -- ie, if somebody gets all their trade secrets and sells them then the thief might only collect $50,000 but it might cause $1,000,000 of harm to the company.
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Information Should Be Free
I wonder how they came to that figure.
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Re: First Expected Moment
Of course some of these posts would make more sense if everyone knew what value was. In the context of this article value is “a numerical quantity measured or assigned or computed.” And so the real question is not the specific value by itself, but a specific value derived by a specific means. Value can be considered what someone is willing to pay for it… This is called a sales-comparison approach to value. Value can be considered by it’s cost to replace… This is called a cost-approach to value. My favorite value approach is the income approach to value used in real estate. This is where the thing being valued is not considered, only the income from the thing being valued (and expenses). Value can be considered by any other number of factors for different purposes, but none make sense without a context. In the instance of this article, value is solely given based on the feelings, thoughts, and motives of the people who have laptops. This is because there is no standard for laptop valuation. One person’s word is as good as the next. Imagine what value we would get for the content of one laptop, if everyone in the world gave it value based on their on criteria and we averaged it out. So we find the number they produced doesn’t mean anything practically.
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What is value?
If the stuff inside people's laptops is really that valuable, why aren't they "lost" more often? Perhaps it's that the stuff is actually really valuable to the person to whom it belongs. It's not replaceable like a diamond bracelett or a Corvette. The only things in life which are genuinely valuable are those whe cannot easily replace, and those things we have actually created ourselves, preferably from scratch.
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How value is determined
Not to mention the fact that not just any idiot who steals a laptop knows how to profit off of the information. Incan matrimonial headmasks? They are worth alot too, but I don't know how to make money off them. (Apologies to S. Soderbergh).
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Great...
Now laptop thefts are going to sky rocket as every stupid thief out there is going to assume that a laptop means a million dollar pay day.
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Re: Great...
my laptop has porn, movies, and graphic programs, any1 willing to pay me a million for it, i wont hessitate.
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Re: Great...
Since they were talking about business laptops, they should have related the value to how much the company would have lost if the laptop data was broken/lost and irrecoverable
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Re: Great...
I didn't think of it that way. Forget letting some dumb punk make millions off of my laptop! I'm going to do it on my own?
Any bidders?
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Re: Great...
with all the identity theft occuring at financial instutions and government agencies, a million dollars of damage from stolen computers can happen very quickly.
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My IP is worth $millions!!!
FTA, this value is: in terms of "intellectual property or commercially sensitive information", with users slapping an average estimate of its worth around the £550,000 mark ($974,000, €804,000).
People and organizations regularly claim absurdly high values for their "intellectual property".
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