Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view
Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view
Posted Aug 3, 2023 7:33 UTC (Thu) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)In reply to: Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view by khim
Parent article: Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view
The entire business model of game consoles has (at least historically) been to sell moderately powerful computers at slightly below cost, and make up the losses in game sales. If you can't sell (enough) games because you can't (sufficiently) control the OS, then you have to raise the price of the console above the price of a comparable gaming PC (or some competing console), and then consumers notice the price is too high and jump ship. That does not apply to generic commodity computers, which are normally sold above cost, the manufacturer does not care what happens after the consumer buys one, and there is (for the most part) nowhere else for consumers to go if the price is too high (aside from other manufacturers of the same product).
It sounds like your claim is that a similar business model (sell lots of software to subsidize your underpriced hardware) would have developed for commodity computers, but I find that difficult to believe. The whole point of games is that they are, to some extent, consumable. You play a game, and then, eventually, you stop playing it and go play something else instead. You may, eventually, return to an old game, but you're still going to want to play something new every now and then, so you keep buying new games. This is not how generic productivity software works - users buy the software they want, and then it may be many years between paid updates, particularly in the time period we're talking about (i.e. long before the subscription model became standardized). You simply don't have enough of a steady income stream to pay for all the hardware.
Posted Aug 3, 2023 8:29 UTC (Thu)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (1 responses)
Nope. I'm just saying that attempt to close thing up is natural for the business. It's almost instinct. John Deere doesn't sell it's devices below cost, now, does it? Yet it locks them up. And the same thing is done by printer manufacturers (although in that case some models are sold below cost) and makers of anything complex enough to be locked up. Even if there are no actual, full-blown, crypto-key-enabled lock down there are no incentive to make things compatible with one, single, Linux image (look on these endless attempt to develop a way to create one, single, Linux kernel image for ARM devices). If PC market is an exception (and it is an exception) then there needs to be reason for it to behave differently from all other markets. Part of the reason is the use of software supplied buy third party developers. But even bigger reason is OS supplied by third-party. PC is unique not because it has lots of programs (smartphones or IBM servers have lots of software, too), but because OS and hardware come from different source (OS from Microsoft, PCs from hundreds of hardware vendors). This is what's unique in a PC world and this is result of lucky accident which happened when IBM lost control over IBM PC-compatibles market. But without Microsoft being big enough to force a single standard there would have been balkanisation and lock downs, anyway (witness development of Androd or smart TVs).
Posted Aug 4, 2023 1:33 UTC (Fri)
by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
[Link]
John Deere has a business model where they charge you an arm and a leg for first-party repairs. Printer manufacturers have a business model where they pretend that their ink is more valuable than unicorn blood. Both of those business models are defeated by user tampering.
> Even if there are no actual, full-blown, crypto-key-enabled lock down there are no incentive to make things compatible with one, single, Linux image (look on these endless attempt to develop a way to create one, single, Linux kernel image for ARM devices).
Do you mean at the time, or now? Because now, if you try to sell a computer that doesn't run Linux, you'll find that the datacenter side of the equation is wholly uninterested in dealing with you, so you'll have to retail them to individual consumers, which is much more of a PITA than selling them in bulk directly to FAANG or whoever (not to mention, you probably get lower margins on retail than B2B).
At the time, of course, datacenters were less of a "commodity hardware" thing and more of a "nobody gets fired for buying DEC/IBM/what-have-you" thing. Nevertheless, I tend to imagine that, in a B2B context, you're inevitably going to have startups eyeing the cheap end of the market, and asking questions about exactly how much you get for paying the IBM tax. Under a balkanized hypothetical, you'll have companies picking the cheap arch, or even companies trying to use multiple arches and figuring "hey, they all speak TCP/IP, right?" Inevitably, the inefficiencies here will drive the more expensive arches to become more niche and specialized, and the cheap arches towards the mainstream. That's just the invisible hand of capitalism.
> (witness development of Androd or smart TVs).
The difference is, nobody is trying to build a datacenter out of phones or TV sets. Some people are buying Android in bulk for their employees, but they save money with BYOD rather than by buying cheap devices. So there's much less economic pressure on the inefficiency, and it persists.
> It sounds like your claim is that a similar business model (sell lots of software to subsidize your underpriced hardware) would have developed for commodity computers
Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view
Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view