JIT advantage -- Xeon chip
Patrick,
Vendors, however, will not be shipping their products until the fall, with the exception of Dell. With its indirect competitors still struggling to clear out old inventory from the channel, direct vendor Dell showed off its new Xeon-based NT workstation line, the Precision 610. The new line will ship the week after the Xeon announcement.
I think that this exemplifies the JIT advantage over the traditional channel approach. The channel vendors, having inventory on the shelf, have an unpleasant decision to make:
a) they can try to move their inventory first, perhaps at a discount to what they had intended, before offering the newest technology; this allows JIT manufacturers an uncontested headstart selling the newer technology but may allow the channel vendors to maintain some margin of profitability on their current inventory; or
b) they can start to offer the newest immediately, side by side with their current inventory, in which case they have to discount current inventory more. In this case, they may end up taking a loss on current inventory, which they have to hope they can make up with increased sales of the newer, higher-margin technology.
Now repeat this scenario every 3-6 months.
With Intel's Xeon chip due to be announced on June 29, PC workstation vendors are eager to announce their next generation of products based on the chip. They face the challenges of scaling Windows NT further into the Unix space.
Does anyone have historical data on Unix vs Windows/NT based market share?
DELLish, 3.
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