> After reading this thread I think there is a lot of unfair speculation. > Ok, I don't like what Oracle has done with OpenSolaris but VDI seems to > get some serious attention within Oracle. > Since Oracle is creating a special desktop line of business one can even > argue that they are more serious than Sun ever was about it. > So it would not be wise for Oracle to kill all the demand with higher > prices.
Right, but since edu is probably not typically a profitable sector for Oracle, edu doesn't get the same type of attention. I think the engineering side of Sun Ray is doing just fine so far, it's just edu sales that seems to be in limbo. Oracle is probably aiming VDI at large corporations that are more likely to make large purchases. > It would be a much better approach for their bottom line to go for large > sales volume at lower prices. > Since large numbers would bring the Sun Ray production costs down. > The development cost of the software is not related to the number of > licenses sold. > This means that the RTU price can come down if there are more Sun Rays > sold. > This would of course make the Sun Ray more competitive against other > solutions. > > This is just economics (Law of increasing and diminishing returns). > Oracle just has to figure out what the optimal pricing needs to be, to > get the optimal returns. > If Oracle succeeds in increasing the volume I think the pricing will > eventually be lower than Sun could have ever made them. > The reason for that is that Sun was unable to get the volume sales going > and thus had a problem with the high production cost. I hope you are right. Unfortunately edu (which is the majority focus of the complaints in this thread) is not simple economics, since there is long term investment and building product image. I think asking to financially justify edu discounts is like asking how basic research can be immediately monetized. > I also heard that they were planning a hardware support fee for the Sun > Ray. > I believe it is 8% or less. Not 25% or higher. Steve's quote for $73/$431 doesn't come out to 8% or less. Maybe the $73 is actually for the software? > You don't have to pay for support with NComputing. > Well, than you probably have no support when something is not working. > There is no 24x7 free support. Right, but in edu market, we often have enough resources in-house to provide basic support, and find that the cost of dealing with issues on a case-by-case can be less than maintaining a support contract. For instance, we have Bronze support from Sun; we don't need Premier 24x7 support because we are not a 24x7 institution and a Sun Ray outage is not a mission critical failure either (we won't hemorrhage thousands of dollars in productivity because of it). Under Oracle, we have no other options than Premier. Maybe it is cheaper than Platinum was under Sun, but it is certainly more than Bronze was. Generally, Oracle's actions have shown a turn to focusing more on large enterprises and less on small business, edu, other smaller orgs that probably generate smaller profits. > As for education. > 10 Years ago Larry donated 100 Million dollars to education world wide. > So their must be some room for educational discounts. Where did it go though? But as my blog post from awhile ago pointed out, Larry/Oracle also cut the Sun Academic Excellence Grant program, which was one of the best edu tech donation programs around in the industry when Sun was still around. William _______________________________________________ SunRay-Users mailing list [email protected] http://www.filibeto.org/mailman/listinfo/sunray-users
