John, The admin overhead might make it non competitive. In effect we have that now, with standard parts. All the parts of the chain are unrelated, but there is so much parallelism that they cannot charge monopoly prices and so the prices of every component are very low. Most Sd shops are owner operated and thus work more efficiently than a structured business. In addition the SD shops seem to do a little fraud by OS copying here and there with locals they know and trust. Possibly this was what the XP registration was made to defeat?
That extra $60 on a number of the machines makes a difference if you cheat on 50 OS a month in a small shop, pays the rent.
MSFT has squads of detectives going around checking on leads from other SD shops, they rat on each other, competition in action.
In Toronto, the Chinese shops are notorious for having many bootleg CDs under the table. They only bring them out to those they know and trust. When the squad goes in, they get nothing. What they need is a chinese squad!!.
I do not feel a national SD shop chain will have enough of an economic advantage to offset the ease of entry(1 screwdriver) that the SD shops have. In fact we have quite a few home SD shops. No store at all. just ads in the papers and the guy makes 10 systems a week, delivers and installs at the clients house and makes $100 or so on each one, more if a stolen OS. A lot of people are quite happy to make $1000 a week, cash....and that is another thing, many SD shops cheat on taxes, esp the home builders.
I am trying to think if there is any large SD shop chain now?. There are a few small ones. EPROM inc has about 6 stores in Toronto and surrounds and they have opened up on the left coast as well. They are an SD shop chain.
eprom.com
Bill |
