It's a common marketing practice [LWN.net]

It's a common marketing practice

Posted Apr 2, 2008 2:46 UTC (Wed) by gdt (subscriber, #6284)
In reply to: It's a common marketing practice by mckay
Parent article: A creative example of the value of free drivers

IBM practiced this across their MVS mainframe range for many years. Their customers didn't feel too upset, as they were basically renting MIPS. At original sale IBM would ship bigger iron with some CPUs either clocked slow or disabled. Then the customer would pay more, a "screwdriver upgrade" would occur, and the customer would IPL (reboot) into a faster machine.

The benefit to the (typically banking and government) customer was simple. A mainframe "forklift upgrade" takes about two years of planning to minimise risk and disruption. An IPL takes about eight weeks of planning.

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It's a common marketing practice

Posted Apr 4, 2008 0:46 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

These days, even turning a screwdriver is pretty expensive, so this kind of price discrimination is done with cryptographic keys -- you pay your money and the vendor emails you a key that brings the dormant or underutilized hardware to life.

Sometimes you can downgrade again later too.