From: Alexander 'Sasha' Chislenko (sasha1@netcom.com)
Date: Fri Jan 22 1999 - 20:51:40 MST
Just read some review of recent trends in PC prices.
The author explains the appearance of sub-$1000 PCs
by the Moore's "Law".
But personal computers were getting better for the last
15 years. Why haven't been the prices falling then?
My explanation is that the computers just got easy enough
to use to move down to the poorer social groups for whom
a "sweet price spot" is lower, and also that there is no
software that would make a $2500 machine universally
more attractive than a $1000 machine, to justify the additional
expense for all people - while alternative ways of spending
the difference promise greater utility.
This process will probably continue, so we may soon see
easy-to-use general-purpose PCs for $100 that kids can carry
in their backpacks, etc.
There may be a new life in higher-level part of the market after
the next waves of software products [?] hit the market.
Another interesting question is, why the computers are not
getting more expensive? Even the richest people wouldn't
buy a $50,000 machine, let alone a million-dollar machine.
This machine would just take more space and require more
maintenance, while giving no perceptible advantage in personal
productivity over a $6,000 PC. Even this machine is already
a bit of an overkill, unless you do something professional on
it - compile lots of code, optimize some systems, etc.
If we see applications that can work well on a mass-market PC,
but would perform much better on more and more expensive
machines, people would buy these machines. (Though I am not
sure even here; unless this power is needed locally all the time,
it may make sense to dispatch computational requests to
the specialized distributed machines rather than execute them
locally). What would these applications do? Speech and image
recognition? AI? All-purpose personal extensions?
Then, if the price range of general-purpose machines stretches
from $100 to $1M, they would probably need different hardware,
OSs, architectures, and applications - and the mass-market of
essentially identical machines will become a thing of the past...
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Alexander Chislenko <http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/home.html>
<sasha1@netcom.com> <sasha@media.mit.edu>
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