From: Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Mon Sep 11 2000 - 00:39:48 PDT
Fielding, Roy writes:
> What makes you think that price isn't a design trade-off?
Price is a function of number of units produced, the economy of
scale. If a novelty is too weird, it can't sell in quantities so the
prices stay high and it can't sell in quantities (I would have loved
to buy a black cube (or, better, a lisp machine), and I did watch the
price development of DIY transputer boards avidly. Alas.
The majority of the consumers does not at all understand the
technology, and the risk-averse industry almost never engages the
expensive development, manufacturing and marketing machinery for
something which is not an incremental improvement on already a well
selling product.
I could have only afforded them well after the fact, when they were
essentially obsolete. The one thing I could afford I did buy: my Amiga
2000 in early 1988. What happened to that particular product line did
not exactly increase in my belief that the industry and the consumer
community was rational.
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