Ali,
<So the technical merits of the product are purely secondary to their plans for world domination.>
Yes, you found perfect words. Remember 8086 versus 68000 - a well-known example. Thanks.
When you're an investor you want to find companies that dominate their segment. That's how you make the most profit and drive the share price up. It's the employees of competitive companies and those who's livelihood is put at risk by the dominant company that want to see it fail. Well, life is like that. No one needs buggy whips anymore, so the buggy whip makers went out of business. They had to find new skills. Life is about Change. Someone wins and someone loses. In the end, having a dominant player can make the market more efficient.
I was the hardware product manager for one of the first MS-DOS PCs ever (the HP 150 touchscreen computer, if any one is interested). Because there was no standard yet for the BIOS or for the add-in cards, we had to have every single software vendor port their MS-DOS software to our particular platform. And they had to do that for every PC platform that existed! Likewise, we designed our own add-in cards and couldn't leverage the commonality across PCs. Very, very, very inefficient. By having the IBM standard be adopted over the next couple of years, competition increased and the cost of PCs came down dramatically, as did the cost of add-in cards. The customer gained a huge benefit.
If AMD would stop this silly fight (which again, I suspect they will), the cost of RDRAM would come down as all the manufacturers jumped on board and everyone would benefit. Even the DRAM manufacturers will pass along the Rambus royalty fee -- it won't be paid out of profits. So the customer pays a little extra in royalty, but a lot less because there's more competition.
Dave |
