Sure. That's the point I was making about cheap wintel solution and the
fast food value menu. With computers it's a higher administrative and
maintenance issue. With food it's a health issue. I also call this the
Top Ramen argument. You can "save" a lot of money eating only Top Ramen
@ $0.25 a meal. You'll need to money you saved for the medical bills.
Either way that's consumer side economics.
My analogy was about producer side economics. Sure you can boil both
down to supply and demand, all things considered. The trouble is, not
all things are being considered. And that's the fatal flaw in the "gain
mind share argument". It's a way bigger picture than just mind share.
The mind share I'd grab does nothing to affect my costs in the the
addressable market.
The entire thin client marketplace is .00166 of the entire PC
marketplace. This makes it impossible for reduce the cost of my raw
materials for my specialized device even if I had 100% of the thin
client market. I don't care what market you are in, no one is driving
anything at .00166 Doesn't mean it's a bad business, your just not a
market driver.
Our competition is one of the reasons we have to keep our margins low,
and ironically enough the exact reason that real thin clients can't grab
a whole number percentage.
The rest of the thin client device market is basically a bunch of
companies that would be considered a very low end Dell clone. The
customers get sold on the benefits of a real thin client, but get sold
low-end PC, which has far more margin. And when you need features, they
sell it to you in add on software. More margins. Customers who don't
figure that out are repeat customers, the ones that do will never touch
thin clients again.
Their entire business model is about planned obsolescence. They don't
care if you pay for top level support, they can't support that device
for very long anyhow. Their R&D is next years model.
These companies think they can be the next Dell, the Cloud Dell so to
speak. However their model is the very thing that is actually holding
the thin client market back from really gaining "mind share". Dell
knows exactly what a cloud PC is and they can do it cheaper than these
companies.
This is what makes people like Brian Madden and other well respected
pundits cringe at the thought of thin clients. They know exactly what
they are and how silly it is to waste time on them. So when someone
like me tries to talk them about Sun Ray they hear about the linux/unix
server requirement, they call you niche, proprietary, or they don't talk
about you at all. And the latter happens the most.
So, then mind share is good right? But there's a sucker born every
minute that is going to fall for the stripped down PC. Been fighting
that for the past 10 years. You could also consider the past ten years
was an experiment in mind share. It's going to be really hard to
convince Oracle that Sun knew what it was doing financially.
On 2/27/11 6:44 AM, William Yang wrote:
No response on the ikea furniture assembly to craftsman analogy? Man, I
thought that was the best part. tl;dr. ;)
Well...if you insist. Craftsman is great, but sometimes you have to get
what you can afford, which could mean IKEA. Besides, even if the product
isn't as good, a lot of people just see the short term benefits of easy to
assemble/deploy and low apparent cost (after all, usually those of us in IT
that really understand the technologies don't have too much say over where
the dollars go), even if in the long term the product isn't as high quality
or will cost more support dollars (analogous to repairs).
Perhaps a better analogy than you imagined :)
William Yang
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