[geeks] Wireless Routers

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Thu, 06 Jul 2006 @ 23:33 -0400, Phil Stracchino said:

> Indeed.  And if Linksys sold the WAP54G for even the same price as the
> WRT54G, let alone appropriately less, I'd have bought a WAP54G instead
> of a WRT54G.
> 
> But basically only businesses buy them.  So the PHB factor of "If it
> costs three times as much, it must be three times as good" applies.  And
> so they're priced accordingly.

This is one of those things which has always sucked about the industry,
though I can see why it happens.

It's cheaper to buy the same OEM part and sell it at different price
points with different features enabled, than to buy N different parts
for N different markets.

The fact that upper management lives in an alternate reality is just
icing on the cake for the manufacturers.

For another example of this: nVidia video cards use the same GPU for
different market price points.  The latest GPUs have either 16 or 20
pipelines, and the BIOS turns N of them on, depending on the cost of the
card.  They can also software toggle some video quality features on some
of the GPUs.

This let's EVGA, for example, buy the same GPU in large numbers, and use
BIOS to turn on different features at different price points.

Of course, smart users figure out how to turn those features on even if
they didn't pay for them.

It still works out for EVGA though, because they also usually put faster
or more memory in the higher end card, so someone will always want the
best.

> I sometimes wonder what kind of twisted headspace upper-level managers
> live in.  But then I start to ponder the necessary contradictions and
> inconsistencies that must be accepted without question, and I decide
> it's not worth my remaining sanity to delve too deeply into it.

And yet, if you have to work in or with people in the corporate world,
you have to face it every day.

There are times when I hear things, and the next day I have a hard time
convincing myself it was real and not a dream or nightmare.

I've been in places where we got together and compared notes, to make
sure we all heard the same thing from a PHB, because none of us was
totally sure we had really heard it.










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