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On 22/09/10 21:04, Simon Waters wrote:
What license fees??? What software costs??? Have you never heard of FLOSS? What mark-up - the government is doing this for themselves? There are 90 MILLION secondary school children in India. The software costs and development costs are effectively zero. The licence costs are , "what you don't want in then?" or near zero - or rather included in the $35. The consumer electronics market is no where near the rock bottom. It could be but that doesnt make money - continually changing and restricting and leaking out product development raises profits for the manufacturers and for the consumer. There is a cabal out there forcing prices high and holding back development to sell the same shit to you again and again. I do not expect the $35 pad to be with us anywhere soon, no because it is not achievable technically but because of Indian and global corruption. Capitalism is good at making other alternatives look bad - but I bet more money has been spent already by MS and others dissing this idea than will be spent developing it! If I had a near guaranteed market of all SCHOOL pupils in India - close on 200 million and another 10 million a year after that and then an opportunity to sell to the rest of the world where markups of 50% in the UK are quite common I'd be happy. As for Android it has no benefits on this sort of machine - its of a little use when you use power hungry phone devices but limits your free software market by 99.9%.On 22/09/10 17:18, tom brough wrote:Impressive IF I can really get one for $35 dollars.....You won't get it for $35. Capitalism may be bad at many things, but I suspect the cost of consumer electronics in such a competitive market is pretty close to rock bottom already. $35 sounds like a manufacturing price from the announcement, it excludes software. With the Simputer there was a significant manufacturing license fee, and the device only sold 4,000 units, resulting in no one making any money. So assume 1,000,000 USD license fee (to pay for the Indian scientists), chuck in 100% retail mark-up, and maybe another 20 USD per unit for software costs, and you are talking about ~120 USD device retail. If you can guarantee selling more than 50,000 of them one might even make a profit at that price. You can already buy Brand name tablets in the 120 USD price range running Android if that is what you want.
Tom te tom te tom -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq