Apple Mac (was: !Re: Nuke Redmond!)

From: Jerome Fine <jhfine_at_idirect.com>
Date: Tue Apr 11 19:00:03 2000

>On 10 Apr 2000, Eric Smith wrote:

>>> Maybe not quite as bad as TI, although that $150 "developers club" affair
>>> is pretty close (at least to me, who was a starving college student at the
>>> time).
>> Apple gave the Inside Macintosh stuff to pretty much any University or
>> College that wanted it.
>Oh, I'm sure the university I was going to (UC Santa Barbara) had multiple
>copies--locked away in some consultant's office where we mere
>peons...er...students couldn't get to it.

Jerome Fine replies:

I find it interesting that long before the stranglehold by M$ was in place,
other companies were also employing tactics that we all grew to find
so distasteful. Of course, since Apple never achieved the clout of M$,
no one complained as hard since the practices eventually led to their
downfall.

Even DEC never learned that an open architecture was far more
beneficial in the long run.

>> It's easy for people to insist that documentation ought to be free, and
>> you can make a better case for it today (with electronic distribution)
>> than back in 1984, but the fact was that the $150 would barely have
>> covered Apple's costs.

I seem to remember that S&H charged about $ US 100 for their
documentation of TSX-PLUS which was about 700 pages all
together. Reasonable compared to the cost of making a copy,
so probably fewer copies were made.

>> For comparison, how much did a DEC Orange Wall (TM) of VMS documentation
>> cost in 1984? I seriously doubt that DEC gave it away, and suspect that
>> the complete set was *much* more than $150, but I don't recall hearing
>> the same degree of grumbling about it.
>Yeah, but DEC's were hardly "personal" computers at the time. In that
>arena, one expected to pay substantially more than a PC owner for software
>and docs...and DEC's customers (large organizations of one type or
>another) could afford it and gladly(?) coughed it up...

Since prior to about 1985, the PC was still so slow and limited, the
price charged was more a reflection of how much the system was
worth rather that how much it cost to produce. As a result, profit
margins at the unit level were able to reflect the VERY inefficient
marketing and support groups in any given company that was selling
computer hardware and/or software.

When the PC became a viable alternative with the introduction of the
386 and many companies began to realize that Intel would soon be
bringing a 486 to market, the sales model began to shift from
"low volume/high mark-up" to "high volume/low mark-up", at least
on a comparative basis. So the IBM model first used (probably by
IBM) to great effect started to break down at just the wrong time
for DEC although Ken Olsen was obviously oblivious. It is my
understanding that around 1985, the decisions that led to DEC's
downfall were taken. A rather small OEM which was supplying
industrial type systems using PDP-11 hardware shifted from almost
all DEC in 1985 for almost all non-DEC by 1988. The primary
reason was the heavy surcharges that DEC began to enforce on
small OEM companies around that time. As a direct result, the
"free" sales force that these companies represented for DEC
was lost to DEC along with the hardware and especially software
sales. While the initial result was a higher profit, total DEC sales
figures seemed to stagnate shortly thereafter.

I never took much interest in VMS, so I never found out just how much
a DEC Orange Wall cost for VMS. Can anyone provide an answer?
And just for the record, any estimate of how many single-sided pages?

I do seem to remember that the last price DEC set for the DOCs for RT-11
was about $ US 1300 if purchased by themselves. That is about 9 or 10
inches of just double sided paper if all the cardboard is removed or about
3 feet if put into binders. Probably the equivalent of about 5000 single-sided
pages, but I could easy be low or high by 50%. Does anyone else have an
estimate?

Sincerely yours,

Jerome Fine
Received on Tue Apr 11 2000 - 19:00:03 BST