Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!uflorida!gatech!purdue!decwrl!labrea!glacier!jbn
From: jbn@glacier.STANFORD.EDU (John B. Nagle)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Re: NeXT Memory - No Error Checking or Parity !
Message-ID: <17910@glacier.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: 18 Dec 88 19:26:18 GMT
References: <1429@cpoint.UUCP> <680002@hpcuhc.HP.COM> <15877@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu>
Reply-To: jbn@glacier.UUCP (John B. Nagle)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 26

In article <15877@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> bkliewer@iuvax.UUCP (Bradley Dyck Kliewer) writes:
>assuming RAM prices become reasonable again, which they surely will.

       I don't expect this to happen.  Now that the Japanese manufacturers
have achieved total market dominance, prices will be coordinated by the
makers (which is legal in Japan) and will fall slowly, if at all.  The
era of "forward pricing" is over in RAM.  Observation of the price trend
in cars, color TVs, and VCRs will indicate the strategy.  

       Yes, there will be 4 and 16Mb RAMs.  But, just as we have seen with
the 1Mb RAMs, they will not be priced so as to kill the market in smaller
RAMs until sufficient time has elapsed, say five years, that the investment
in the older technology has been repaid.

       Seen in this light, the rumor that 4Mb will be skipped and the
RAM industry will go directly to 16Mb makes more sense.  Having achieved
coordination, it makes sense to wait until the 1Mb technology is fully
amortized while working out the 16Mb production process, then introduce
the new model in a controlled way.  This is how a cartelized industry
operates.

       One implication of this is that we cannot rely on advances in 
semiconductor technology to save us from the tendency of software to grow
in size without bound.

					John Nagle