On Tue, February 2, 2010 01:27, Tim Cook wrote: > Except you think the original engineering is just a couple grand, and > that's > where you're wrong. I hate the prices just as much as the next guy, but > they do in fact need to feed their families. In fact, they need to do a > hell of a lot more than that, including paying off what is likely bumping > up > against a 6-figure education for the engineering degrees they hold to > design > that hardware. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it, and it > wouldn't > be expensive.
I don't think the complaint is mostly about the part Sun engineered, though; it seems to me the complaint is about the price of what looks and smells to many of us like essentially the same disk drive we can buy for 1/10 the price at Newegg. Now, I'm sure not ALL drives offered at Newegg could qualify; but the question is, how much do I give up by buying an enterprise-grade drive from a major manufacturer, compared to the Sun-certified drive? I can easily believe that Sun and the vendors spend many man-months qualifying a drive, and that perhaps there are even custom firmware versions for the Sun-certified drives. For a single drive, what's a not-crazy estimate? 12 man-months? Fully-loaded man-months costing about $250k/year? If they sell 10,000 of that drive, the per-drive cost of qualification would seem to be $25. Of course, I made up all the numbers, and have no idea if the quantity in particular is sane or not. Anyway, it's thinking like this that leads some of us to feel that a $900 premium is not reasonable. I suppose anybody who really knows sales numbers can't talk about them, and the same for some of the other bits. Still, the way to combat misperceptions (if these are in fact misperceptions) is with more accurate information. (I actually worked in the group Thumper came out of for a bit; I was working on the user interface software for the video streaming software that Thumper was developed to provide storage for. I was with Sun 2005-2008.) > If you think they're overcharging, you're more than welcome to go into > business, undercut the shit out of them, and still make a ton of money, > since you think they 're charging 10x market value. I also think I'm not qualified to do that; I'm a software guy, neither management nor marketing nor hardware engineering. Also, if they really are charging 10x, then they can easily cut prices to compete with any upstarts, a fact that potential investors would take note of. -- David Dyer-Bennet, d...@dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
