It depends on who's running your company. The bog-standard MBA's in middle management love to minimize capital outlay, preferring to expense everything possible. Sure, there are tax advantages, but it becomes a rule-of-thumb in most Fortune 500's, and winds up infecting IT as well. What a lot of blue chip companies STILL haven't grasped is that IT is as strategic, differentiating, and important as any custom machine they can design, build, and install on an assembly line, and the software engineers, as much or more, important as the product engineers.