Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>]

In article <ouf0k7.oe.ln@bigbird.sw.asiainfo.com>,
  markh@usai.asiainfo.com wrote:
> So, a vendor which was charging $2000 per seat (list
> price) for a C compiler was at the same time charging
> $10,000 per seat for the equivalent Ada system.
> You could argue that the Ada system did 5 times more
> than the C system, but the impression I got was that
> they charged more simply because they felt they could,
> and that other vendors would pay since they would
> consider it as a necessary cost of doing business
> with the government.

Much more likely was that the market for C was much greater
than the market for Ada. That clearly gets reflected in the
price. There are often also considerably different levels of
support involved.

Think about televisions, I can buy a very nice 25" television
for $250 these days, but if I want a monitor of similar size
for a computer, they cost a lot more. Better quality? Well
that's part of it, but mostly there are far more 25" television
sets in the world than large screen computer monitors.

In the case of software the manufacturing cost is very low,
so everything comes down to volume and support requirements.

There is also the general issue of trying to guess the
elasticity of the market. Some Ada vendors tried the low cost
product approach, but in Ada 83 days at least, this was not
very successful.


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