🚀 go-pugleaf

>   More "outrageous prices" --- care to justify these assertions?
>
>Okay, How many manufacturers are getting $10,000 for a 1.3 gig drive?
>How about $2000 for a single hard drive controller?  $8,000 for a 351
>meg drive?  (I would point out that an 8 meg RAM card costs $8,000,
>but I understand SGI has even higher prices than that.)  These are
>what I call outrageous prices.

[advance warning: possible tongue-in-cheek posting]

	Let's set up a hypothetical situation, and see how it fits. ;)
I have no idea if this is correct, but from where I sit this seems to
be what happens all the time...

Suppose you have a vendor and a 3rd party who both sell a 1.3Gb drive
for their computer. The vendor sells it for $10,000 and the 3rd party
for $3,000. Outrageous. Then we find out that the vendor has actually
designed and built that drive from the ground up, tested and qualified
it, documented it, laid in spare logic boards for it, had to set up a
whole field service organization that understands that drive, etc. The
3rd party, who are much smarter, buy the drives en masse and put them
in a customized box with a power supply purchased en masse. Let's just
suppose that the 3rd party pays $500 for the bare drive and logic board
and cabinet. Adding assembly, cost of sale, staffing and stocking, etc,
and they sell the drive for $3000 and pocket $500/drive. The vendor,
after building the drive, logic, paying the engineers, etc, etc, etc,
etc until they are blue in the face, finally slashes the price and
manages to sell the 1.3Gb drive for ONLY $10,000 and pockets $500/drive.

	Digital still has (but it's changing *FAST*) a tendency to
want to build everything from the ground up, rather than buying it
off the shelf, stuffing it into a box, and putting a label on it.
This is apparently not a very effective approach these days, since
it increases the time to market, increases costs, and decreases
revenues. I suspect a hard dose of reality is effecting a change.
The fact that Digital has been getting increasingly aggressive with
keeping prices down is a good sign to me - look at the DEC PCs -
they are almost in the ballpark of taiwan, inc. PCs. Nobody, even
IBM is getting away with selling overpriced stuff "hand built from
the ground up by craftsmen in our plant in the black forest, each
piece lovingly polished by a bevy of maidens before wrapped in
silk and shipped by cruise ship to your door" anymore.

	In short, you don't need to flame DEC for what you perceive
as high prices. Buying stuff from a 3rd party hurts a lot more than
anything you can post to USENET, and gets noticed more.

mjr.