To: Brooke S who wrote (25375 ) 7/20/1999 4:36:00 PM From: Dave B Respond to
Brooke,Have ya'll ever seen the intel commercial where they say "Pentium III leverages the power of the internet"? PLEASE, I have yet to come across a web site that utilized my PIII in any way shape or form. By the time my use of the internet will be affected, impacted, enhanced or otherwise by my choice of processor and memory, I will be using a Pentium VII or something. the ordinary customer buying a high or mid-high range computer is not going to know the technical differences between SDRAM, DDR DRAM, and RDRAM, nor are they going to research them. They're going to hear 800Mhz versus 133Mhz or 266Mhz and believe that a system with 800Mhz memory is going to be much, much faster. Salespeople in the channels will push RDRAM boxes since 800Mhz memory is much sexier to sell than 133Mhz memory, and they want to sell the customer up anyway (this is, of course, after CPQ, HWP, etc. start selling RDRAM boxes in the channel). Companies who do not sell RDRAM boxes, will have a hard time explaining why RDRAM is not 6x faster, and the customers eyes will glaze over long before they get very far. a campaign that says something like "Rambus 800Mhz Memory Inside" (I'd suggest shortening it and making the "800Mhz" the most visible part of the sticker) might in fact suck some buyers in. "Rambus" isn't going to mean anything to the customer, but "800 Mhz" sounds sexy, especially if you're only buying a 400Mhz or 500Mhz processor. It could work, though I'm on the fence as to whether or not we'll see something like it.
