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____/ Homer on Saturday 06 Aug 2011 16:34 : \____
> Verily I say unto thee that Roy Schestowitz spake thusly:
>> ____/ chris on Saturday 06 Aug 2011 11:00 : \____
>>> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>
>>>> http://www.techonia.com/cordia-open-tablet
>>>
>>> I have already thought about getting one because it seems to be
>>> pretty good.
>>>
>>> But unfortunately the project seems to be in a very early phase.
>>> They don't even take preorders yet...
>>
>> Preorders are for hype anyway, creating a sense of excess demand. :-)
>
> No, pre-orders are the assurance start-up manufacturers need that their
> product has the minimum amount of interest necessary to satisfy the
> fabricators' and assemblers' minimum-unit-number production requirement
> and/or their cost-per-unit target. Otherwise either the price per unit
> goes up, or they lose money on unsold units, or they can't even have
> those units produced at all, because the fabricators and assemblers
> refuse less than a certain minimum order (typically 1000 units for small
> production companies, rising to hundreds of thousands for companies like
> TSMC).
>
> This is why Nicholas Negroponte spends so much time, money and effort
> travelling the globe to solicit order commitments from governments and
> education suppliers. Without those commitments, he literally can't
> afford to produce the XO laptop, or the cost per unit rises to beyond
> the point of viability for the client. That's why Microsoft and Intel
> "competing" with his OLPC charity was so damaging. Every order poached
> by Intel and Microsoft (for the more expensive ClassMate, typically sold
> to less impoverished nations) drove up the production (and thus retail)
> cost of the XO, made it less viable for poorer nations, and delayed mass
> production due to insufficiently large production orders. The end result
> is millions of poor kids don't get laptops at all, thanks to Microsoft
> and Intel.
>
> However, the pre-order process is also abused as a hype tactic by
> certain companies, mostly commercial games developers, who have already
> committed all their production costs anyway, and for whom the concept of
> "mass production" is essentially meaningless, as with all software, or
> any other sort of ethereal "product". E.g. a mere "license" has zero
> production cost, and thus things like volume discounts and pre-orders
> for such things are just meaningless or even predatory.
The smiley face was intended to symbolise a dose of sarcasm. I know that
preorders are really needed in some circumstances, but these are nowadays
being abused by marketing departments in companies like Apple.
- --
~~ Best of wishes
Dr. Roy S. Schestowitz (Ph.D. Medical Biophysics), Imaging Researcher
http://Schestowitz.com | GNU/Linux administration | PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
Editor @ http://techrights.org & Broadcaster @ http://bytesmedia.co.uk/
GPL-licensed 3-D Othello @ http://othellomaster.com
Non-profit search engine proposal @ http://iuron.com
Contact E-mail address (direct): s at schestowitz dot com
Contact Internet phone (SIP): schestowitz@xxxxxxxxx (24/7)
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