On Friday, May 31, 2019 at 11:02:10 PM UTC-4, charles wrote: > > I was always sad about Gandalf, they kinda Zigged when everyone else > zagged. Way Back when I recall showing one of their engineers one of > the First HAYES modems -and I asked why Gandalf was not in the market. > He answered that PCs were Kids stuff, and that they only made products > for data centers. >
To be fair, that wasn't just Gandalf - that was the mind-set of most of the industry. In the product space that Gandalf occupied there were also companies like Case and DCA, neither of whom were able to successfully transition to the new market. DCA did a quick save by purchasing the IRMA company, who made 3270 adapters for PCs (and later Macs and also standalone units). So they had a new market, pretty much all to themselves, while continuing to have sales / support income from legacy customers. On the other hand, those established companies were selling their products at much higher prices (the 4-port terminal-side board for the PACX IV was $600, and most of that was profit) and they also had partnerships with established modem vendors like ComData and perhaps didn't want to disrupt those deals in order to get into a very price-sensitive market of unknown (at the time) size. There wasn't a lot of movement in the other direction - of the early low-end modem makers, US Robotics was probably the only one to get any sort of sizable penetration of the host-side market. Part of this was a complete lack of understanding about how sales were made on the host side - I don't think any of the low-end modem makers offered reasonable quantity discounts to end users, none offered lease / financing options, and all of them wanted MORE for a rackmount unit (which was a bare board - no case, manual, software, power adapter, cables, etc.) than they wanted for a standalone unit, and of course they also wanted big $ for the rackmount chassis. The sole example was Microcom, who graciously sold their rackmount modems for the same price as the standalone models. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/572e0080-957a-4d95-a028-2b72028eedf7%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
