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Enter the sizzle. The products you don't intend to sell millions of, but which garner an inordinate amount of publicity. This propels your name and image from the obscure to the limelight, and can happen in any arena, from PC's to vacuum cleaners. Getting the name out can be one of the most expensive tasks that face getting a product to market. It is so important and valuable that magazines can charge anywhere from $3000 to $80,000 for a single page, if they have the right market share. So, since only the extremely well financed can purchase that amount of branding, it falls upon the shoulders of the product manager to push anywhere they can, and, of course it helps if the product is very good. A very simple comparison is automobile racing. Companies will spend millions on cars that go 285 mph because everyone will recognize the engine of the car that won, even though they probably won't sell more than a few hundred. Component manufacturers really do make products for "image" purposes. They have to. And it is those products that get the lion's share of the press, the controversy, and a large portion of "coolness" attached.
Most of the time that high end performance trickles down to the mundane, coming within the reach of the pocketbooks of the mass market within a few months, leaving open ground for the next big thing. Intriguingly, it is that very trickle down that erodes margins and makes it increasingly more difficult to top the last whopper.
It is important to keep in mind that we see prices for computing dropping all the time, yet the cost of living goes up and the most expensive resource facing companies is payroll. It simply costs more to develop than it did in the past. Oh sure, the development time has decreased due to software tools and the very computing power being created, but now more products need to come out. Its not an 18 month product life-cycle…its 6 to 8 months, which means 3 times the number of products need to be created and produced simply to stay level with the market. More engineering, testing, marketing and selling.
None of this should worry the consumer, of course. High performance products at low prices are expected. It is interesting that computing is one of the few areas of industry in which prices go down. The average cost of a new system has plummeted by almost 50%.
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