|At 09:45 PM 4/3/97 -0600, Jonah Yokubaitis wrote:
|>On Thu, 3 Apr 1997, Sherwood Pekelo wrote:
|>|Is this under cutting of prices considered Unfair trade? What is the cost
|>|to USR for manufacturing a TC? I've heard that Livingston runs on a tight
|>|margin to ISPs, but still they have a positive markup...unless USR was
|>|seriously gouging on their pricing ( heh, whatever the market would bear I
|>|guess)
|>
|>Bullshit. R&D is the biggest cost in the TC/PM3/MAX. The PM3 is a
|>486/66 with some very nice software in it :-) The DSP modem cards I
|>doubt cost more than $15-25/modem. The entire chassis costs livingston
|>< $1000 to build I would bet.
|
|If you did make that bet, you'd lose.
|
|What you say of the PM3 is true of the PM-11, it was a fairly standard PC
|motherboard and expansion cards and custom software.
|
|All products since then have been fully designed from scratch. Open up a
|PM3 and look at the backplanes. I don't think you will find them in any
|PC. You could also take the CPU part number and look it up in a parts
|catalog, you might find out some interesting aspects about the chip.
We are talking about _actual_ manufacturing costs here, *NOT* R&D.
Read what I said again. I am well aware that is it QUITE expensive to
design a product from scratch, but once you have the design, the
manufacture is not all that expensive.
|>Now, having an ENTIRE company to have to
|>back it plus all the R&D costs + ongoing R&D costs + + + +.
|>
|...
|>Livingston is a software company that loads their software onto fairly
|>off the shelf hardware.
|
|BZZZZT. Thank you for playing. Please come back and play again sometime.
oh really? You think that AMD cpu and 72pin ram and siemens
controllers and analog devices DSPs are something special? Its the
SOFTWARE that makes the PM3/PM2 special. I would bet that livingston
could port ComOs to a RISC platform and make the current x86 platform
meaningless.
This holds true for most vendors of decent products, look how many
different platforms cisco has IOS running on (mips/68k/etc). Its the
SOFTWARE that makes cisco great, its the SOFTWARE that makes
livingston great, its the SOFTWARE that makes netapp great.
Its the SOFTWARE! (Did I say this before?)
|>I rather like the fact that livingston uses off the shelf
|>parts (like $10 486/66 cpus etc) because it will allow them better
|>profit for more R&D for BETTER products that beat those heat burner
|>piece of crap Ascend/cisco boxes.
|
|Now that much is much closer to the truth. If you think about it, another
|reason is the tight focus and resistance to 'freeping creaturism'.
|
|>now, a 10 PRI box with full duplex 100baseT would be quite nice :-)
|
|That WOULD be nice.
Jonah
Jonah Barron Yokubaitis | Texas' First X2 and K56flex
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