On 16-Jan-02, g'o'tz ohnesorge wrote:
> Mika Hanhijärvi wrote:
>
>>>> But please, don't run out and buy a Radeon card just yet. We may AB>>
>> dongle-ize our drivers to some tag we set in Radeon cards we sell, in AB>>
>> an effort to reduce P96 piracy. Elbox screwed the P96 guys, as not all AB>>
>> Mediator users will AB>
>>> i'd be interested in how you'd do this. and also, could you alleviate
>>> fears that we'd be charged vastly unfair prices for the same cards
>>> PC and Mac people can use 'freely' (i mean prices above those of
>>> reasonable PC sellers)
>>
>> Yep that does not sound fair at all. I really would like to buy cheap
>> Radeon
>> card from my local dealers OR more cheaply from second hand markets.
>> Does that mean it is not possible to do that ?

Buy it from your local dealer and pay roughly the same as from us. They have a
profit margin the same way we would. Plus, if you buy it seperately, you have
their markup on the card to deal with, plus my fee for the retail driver CD.
Buy the card from me, and only have one of those two markups to deal with, or
at least one less than the sum of the seperated two. Surely the second-hand
market could save a few bucks on the hardware. I'm sorry that it's not
possible to satisfy all of the people all of the time.

> Well, if drivers would write themselves as soon as you plug a card into a
> non-Windoze box, that'd be fine. But since that isn't implemented yet
> (invent a way how it might happen, I'm not convinced it's really impossible,
> but that's where my present wisdom runs out), the people who spend quite a
> lot of time reading those damn chip docs (can be between 300 and 1750 pages)

322 in one file, 280 in another, 36 in a third, and that's just from ATI. Add
the P96 and Warp3d dev kits, dev kits for the PCI/AGP bridges, it's a lot of
stuff. :)

> and figuring out all the details to get a 3D running that doesn't forget
> most of its polygons half of the time (like nVidea on Windoze) and still
> doesn't crash after half a day, instead of just a plain dumb fixed 640x480
> 16-colour display with no blitter functions at all, I'd figure they earn
> their extra couple of $ for all the work.

And we do not intend to mark things up any more than is fair to the coders.
Too high a price and we don't sell enough to cover our costs any better than
charging too little. I paid US$550 for my PicassoIV, which was equivalent to
a $50 PCI card at the time. It wasn't easy to accept that, and I don't want
to lay that magnitude of markup on anyone else. Using a Radeon in my own
personal machine(s) will be the majority of what I personally get out of
this. We do not intend to charge "vastly unfair prices" to anyone. I realize
we're new on the market, we're ubknown people for the most part. Startups are
like that. The total price will be somewhat more than your local PC dealer.
But we'll do what we can to make it a fair price considering all the costs
involved. I hope this can be an acceptable situation to most users.

> Selling the driver only bundled with a card makes it emotionally easier for
> many
> people to spend the money at all, so there's more hope in that strategy than
> trying to sell the driver separately, and then see whether you can sell as
> much as a second copy before everyone made their own copy from the first. Of
> course I haven't ever seen anybody steal any piece of software, but then
> seasoned dealers and software makers may know that market better than me.

How do you think Microsoft makes the most money? From the retail boxes of
software? Or what they get from Gateway, Dell, etc. who include the MS stuff
with every single box that goes out the door? Include it with the hardware
and you're more likely to get paid for the software. Piracy will still
happen, that's common sense. But less people out there will have a piece of
hardware without the related software inthe box, so less people will have a
reason to find the software "elsewhere".


--
Bill Toner
Forefront Technologies, Inc. (previously Progressive Data Systems)
bill@...