* at 18/02 13:51 -0800 Paul Makepeace said: > On Mon, Feb 18, 2002 at 04:37:42PM -0500, Mike Jarvis wrote: > > Theoretically decreasing overhead means decreased prices for consumers, > > but we all know that never happens in the real world. > > I'm pretty sure I'm paying less for an 80GB of harddrive storage now > than I would've paid two years ago. And so on.
well, the globalisation thing seems to work better for commodity goods[1] like that, esp as the manufacturing process is pretty automated so staff costs are much less of an issue. also marketing spend is a lower percentage of costs for most of these companies. on the other hand the move out to the far east and the drop in labour costs seems to have little effect on the prices of the various companies that have done it. s [1] largely 'cause a lot of the market is selling to other companies who don't have a lot of truck with what their choice of hardrive says about how cool they are. (unless they were a dot com ;)
