Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!nic.MR.NET!shamash!raspail!bga
From: bga@raspail.UUCP (Bruce Albrecht)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Ethics of crippler circuitry
Message-ID: <1257@raspail.UUCP>
Date: 13 Feb 89 20:27:54 GMT
References: <7143@pyr.gatech.EDU> <11630010@hpsmtc1.HP.COM>
Organization: Control Data Corporation, Arden Hills, MN
Lines: 30

In article <4602@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM> jackg@tekirl.LABS.TEK.COM (Jack Gjovaag) writes:
>The ethics of adding "crippling" circuitry to an otherwise high
>performance machine to fill a gap in a product line is not at all
>clear to me.  It certainly seems absurd if we expect that the
>price of a machine is directly related to its manufacturing cost
>but if we assume that what a customer is purchasing is functionality
>with no regard to how it is obtained, then cripplers make some
>sense.

It's not absurd when you view the cost of the "crippled" machine to be
manufacturing costs + the incremental design cost to "cripple" the high
performance machine, and the cost of the high performance machine to be the
manufacturing costs + the design cost for the high performance machine.

Several other business factors come into play here, also.  If a computer
manufacturer has a gap in a product line, the loss of a potential customer
because of that gap, tends to lose that customer for all time, since the
customers tend to be locked into whichever system they buy (except, of course,
plug-compatibles, and IBM is just about the only company that has plug-
compatible competitors).  Therefore, most companies are willing to accept a
smaller profit now so they can get additional revenues (and profits) later.

I think most business customers are buying functionality without regard to
how it is obtained.  When a customers know they need a performance level of X,
and that it costs around $Y, they don't want to buy performance level of X+x'
for $Y+y', even though they may need X+x' later.  That's why IBM (or maybe it
is Amdahl) leases CPUs that run at a certain MIPS rating, and when the customer
needs a faster machine for a short time, they change the microcode to speed it
up, charge the customer more, and resets it to the slower machine when the
customer no longer needs the higher performance.