I don't remember what my point was or where the original notion that kits
often cost more that ready-made, except that if one sells kits, the folks
who buy them usually are competent and capable of fixing their mistakes. If
you sell both kits and ready-made, not only do you have to offer tech
support to the buyers of the ready-made product because you attract a wholly
less competent buyer, but a goodly share of your kit buyers are peoplenot
otherwise competent hoping to save a few dollars by messing the kit up and
then having your tech support people nursemaid them through the repair. I
remember that the kits I bought were accompanied by a parts inventory, an
assembly drawing, a schematic, and an extensive set of assembly and checkout
instructions, none of which accompanies today's PC-oriented products.
You're lucky if you can figure out from any of the paperwork, who built the
product and whom to call if you have a problem.
The kit, of course, has to be properly documented. In today's ready-made
environment, little documentation accompanies a product, though even that's
not often used. Today, the kit would be offered not so people can enjoy
building it, though that's an added benefit for those who really do enjoy
it, but rather to circumvent FCC restrictions if that's still possible. The
FCC testing would keep almost any of the products of this sort with which I
became familiar back in the '70's off the market, first because they would
knock out TV reception for a considerable distance, and secondly because
these volume in which they were built would not cover the cost of the
testing.
If one took the films used twenty years ago for, say, an S-100 board set and
made it available as a kit, i.e. with all the IC's, passives, and hardware,
it would cost quite a bit more than it did back 20 years ago. That's
because of inflation and because labor to buy, stock , kit, and document the
thing would cost more, not just the difference for inflation, but really
more, because the labor cost buys less these days, and because people simply
expect more than they once did. It would also make sense to silkscreen as
much of the documentation for jumper and switch settings onto the board so
the user can't lose it. Though the old IMSAI boards I have are
solder-masked, the old ALTAIR ones are not. That could complicate building
a kit as well, particularly for folks not experienced with soldering.
You're certainly right about the cost of documentation. That's why it's
hard to recommend LINUX and some of the rather excellent pieces of software
work which have been done in conjunction with it. The documentation is
generally quite poor, and always several generations out of date.
Frequently one finds places where key words and phrases have been left out .
. . words like "not" . . .
Dick
-----Original Message-----
From: Philip.Belben_at_pgen.com <Philip.Belben_at_pgen.com>
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
<classiccmp_at_u.washington.edu>
Date: Wednesday, March 31, 1999 10:04 AM
Subject: Re: Kits vs ready-made (was RE: Rebirth of IMSAI)
>
>Sorry if this thread is old hat now - I've been having a hard time keeping
up
>with the volume of traffic here recently.
>
>> Kits are often more costly than ready-built products because kit builders
>> fix their mistakes, while you can't expect the user of ready-made stuff
to
>> fix your mistakes. Tech support is a necessity, yet most kit builders
don't
>> need it. Tech support is what costs when you're selling a ready-built
>> product for the home computer market.
>
>
>This is strange. You are saying: Tech support is what costs. Kits don't
need
>so much. Therefore kits are more expensive. ???
>
>I claim the other way around. Most kit suppliers have to spend _more_ on
>technical support because they have to help people who try kits too hard
for
>them and expect the supplier to sort out their mistakes.
>
>Kits generally have shorter production runs than complete units, hence less
>quantity discount / economy of scale.
>
>Finally, kits are generally better documented than complete units sold as
such.
>And documentation costs a lot!
>
>Philip.
>
>
>
>
>
Received on Wed Mar 31 1999 - 11:57:36 BST