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From: farren@well.sf.ca.us (Mike Farren)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: New Thread: What _REALLY_ makes a product successful?
Message-ID: <24947@well.sf.ca.us>
Date: 22 May 91 09:31:26 GMT
References: <72306@microsoft.UUCP> <760@mixcom.COM> <1991May20.173553.11809@convex.com>
Distribution: usa
Lines: 61

swarren@convex.com (Steve Warren) writes:

> Marketing was a factor, but not the "unknown" factor.  The unknown factor was
>a synergistic combination of marketing and standards, and IBM stumbled into it
>by dumb luck, screaming and thrashing all the way.

Agreed, but as for the rest of your post, well...

>Here is how IBM "stumbled" onto standards:  because they had larger systems
>that had extremely low performance/price ratios when compared to a
>state-of-the-art micro, IBM decided that they could not afford to sell a micro
>that encroached on their other, more costly systems.  So they designed their
>micro systems to be slow and memory limited.  They picked a microprocessor
>that they felt would not threaten their other product lines, and they put
>together a system that was altogether underwhelming.  Then they marketed it as
>if it were an innovation, and it worked.

Not at all the case.  When the PC was introduced, it was the most powerful
micro system offered by anyone with any kind of mass marketing.  The best
you could do at that time, unless you were willing to deal with a "fringe"
outfit like Godbout, was an S100 system, none of which approached the IBM
PC for performance.

The reason for the 8088 processor was simply because at the time the PC was
designed, the biggest expense was in the support chips, NOT the processor.
The PC designers made reasonable choices in the technical environment of the
time.

>What happened next is that the free market kicked in.  Once a few sharp
>engineers noticed how incredibly low-tech this box was, and how incredibly
>high IBM's margin was, they decided to knock-off some copies.

Not for a number of years.  IBM ruled the roost until Compaq came along
(their first *real* competitor - Eagle, Columbia, and such do *NOT* count,
as their "compatibility" was a joke, and they weren't really all *that* 
less expensive).  It wasn't until about a year or two after the introduction
of the PC-AT that clones started appearing in any volume.

>When everyone in the world began making and selling these boxes the
>competition forced prices down to the point that PC-compatibles became
>commodities.  That was when everyday people began to purchase them.

But that didn't happen until well into the cycle.  1985 was about the
earliest you could get "commodity" prices on *any* system.

>The magic happens when intensive marketing is combined with standards.  In
>IBM's case the "standard" was de facto rather than formal.  But nevertheless
>the standard was real.

No, it was much more formal than most.  In most cases, where there *was*
a standard to be followed, IBM followed it.  Notice, for example, their
serial port connectors - the *only* ones, up until then, which adhered to
the RS-232 recommendations for DTE vs. DCE connector gender.  Likewise, their
use of CR *and* LF for carriage return and line feed, respectively, when
almost every other system used either one, or the other, but not both.
They were also the *only* manufacturer of micros to pay attention to such
niceties as worst-case timing analysis, which accounts for some of the
extremely conservative nature of the IBM PC design.

-- 
Mike Farren 				     farren@well.sf.ca.us