Maybe he should write his reports more often, since the market apparently warrants it. <g>
My dim memory recollects that when prices cratered a few years ago (1995?) they went through a similar phenomenon, almost at the same (local) retail price points. I recall the 4MB SIMM dropping to $49 at my favorite local shop, then quickly rising from there about 20% and sustaining a while, perhaps 3 months, before the cratering began again. That time, a transition was in effect to move to 16MB and so forth.
This time, the 64MB DIMM reached $49, for several weeks though (at this same store) and now the price is at $59.
Overall, it's a damped sinusoid on top of a decaying exponential. That is, this upshoot is a result of too great a drop recently, but will soon be followed by a smaller swing to a new low, etc. All seems like basic struggles between supply and demand, with greed (i.e. inventory manipulations) from the suppliers and the wholesalers causing the small oscillations.
The main thing I think of is that even when prices got to their lows recently, I did not feel compelled to upgrade my Sparcstation, my WinNT box, nor my home PC. I think more and more people don't need more memory, since they already have more PC and more RAM than they care about. |
