bake@EE.UCLA.EDU (Dr Rich Baker) (04/24/87)
$12,000 for 4 Meg?! Let's see, a 4 Meg, 1.5 MIP Sun 3/50 now goes for under $5k list... Anyone in Pyramid marketing looked at the price of their competition lately? Rich Baker (bake@ee.ucla.edu)
cal@OKC-UNIX.ARPA.UUCP (04/24/87)
I agree with the previous comment by Mr. Berger about Pyramid memory prices. We recently checked into memory board costs for our 98XE. The quoted price (GSA) was $12000 per four megabyte array. I also would be interested in hearing about any other sources for memory products for the 98X/XE. charles leach (cal@okc-unix)
barry@PRINCETON.EDU (Barry Lustig) (04/24/87)
$12,000 for 4 Meg?! Let's see, a 4 Meg, 1.5 MIP Sun 3/50 now goes for
under $5k list...
Anyone in Pyramid marketing looked at the price of their competition
lately?
Rich Baker (bake@ee.ucla.edu)
I recently got a quote for 2nd source Sun memory. They are offering
a 12 Meg board for a bit over $4,000. Maybe Pyramid has it
backwards :-)
Barry Lustigberger@datacube.UUCP (Bob Berger) (04/24/87)
>From mirror!mit-eddie!@EDDIE.MIT.EDU:bake@ee.UCLA.EDU Thu Apr 23 20:06:32 1987 >$12,000 for 4 Meg?! Let's see, a 4 Meg, 1.5 MIP Sun 3/50 now goes for >under $5k list... > >Anyone in Pyramid marketing looked at the price of their competition lately? > >Rich Baker (bake@ee.ucla.edu) > Exactly my point. And that is what has happend here at Datacube. For the price of a 4Meg memory card from pyramid, we can have 3 Sun 3/50's and some change left over (we are a Sun OEM). Once you start putting Sun diskless nodes on, you want good sun servers and it reduces the need even more for the Pyramid! I like Pyramid, our 90x has served us faithfully for 3 years. I still recommend it highly for folks who need lots of tty ports for lots of simultaneous users, but I think Pyramid is loosing its competative edge in terms of pricing. They are gouging their customer base. Bob Berger Datacube Inc. Systems / Software Group 4 Dearborn Rd. Peabody, Ma 01960 VOICE: 617-535-6644; FAX: (617) 535-5643; TWX: (710) 347-0125 UUCP: ihnp4!datacube!berger {seismo,cbosgd,cuae2,mit-eddie}!mirror!datacube!berger
karn@FLASH.BELLCORE.COM.UUCP (04/24/87)
Last time I looked, Pyramid had no competition in memory sales for their machines. The market is (or was) too small to interest the 3rd party
memory industry. Also, Pyramid's memory price is not out of line with what
other companies charge for memories when they have no competition. How do
you think they sell the CPU's so cheap?
Dave Sincoskieromain@pyrnj.UUCP (Romain Kang) (04/25/87)
I guess someone from Pyramid's going to have to bite eventually.
Might as well be me. I'm sorry this is a little long, but I don't
have official, canned answers.
As a lowly systems engineer out in field, I shouldn't pretend that I
know what the strategic marketing motivations might be. However, the
philosophy that I've always been presented has been one of building a
real, working system for less, rather than just a cheaper CPU. In
this respect, I must say that we have indeed been looking at our
competition.
Since info-pyramid is a now Usenet newsgroup as well as a mailing list,
I don't feel it would be in good taste for me to broadcast competetive
pricing figures, but I can mail them out to people who request them. To
compare ourselves with the market leader in superminis, Digital Equipment,
though, I've come up with a 1.8-1.9 price/performance advantage if you
compare a couple of Pyramid 9820 configurations against equivalent VAX
8800 configurations. (And some small benchmarks I've seen indicate
that we're extremely competitive performance-wise; anyone have an Ultrix
2.0 8700 or 8800 we can rent for a day for more thorough benchmarks?)
The obvious conclusion might be that DEC 8800's are grossly overpriced,
right? Well, since Digital is the market leader, Pyramid has to fight
the perception that since we're much less expensive, we must be some
newfangled product put together in a garage by college dropouts
(oops, sorry Steve and Steve...) In light of this, I've often felt
Pyramid systems are actually underpriced.
But if you look beyond the price of a brand new system, I do feel
$12000 is shocking, especially for the people who and bought their
Pyramids early on and have remained loyal customers. I can only
comment that that's a price that people pay for the rapid evolution of
computers -- if things are advancing so fast (or receding, like memory
prices), you pay to be at the bleeding edge. Witness, for example, the
people with early versions of Apple's Macintosh, who are paying for
their upgrades or otherwise getting stranded. And the companies that
I'm mentioning, DEC and Apple, are GOOD companies.
A word about Sun: They are not our competition. Sun and Pyramid are
allies in the UNIX world. Note that we follow Sun standards like NFS,
and that we've recently signed an OEM agreement with them. However,
maybe it isn't quite fair to compare Sun memory with Pyramid memory;
except for the Sun 3/2xx series, Sun uses parity-checked memory rather
than ECC (which all Pyramid boards use). Nothing wrong with that for
workstations with up to 8-12M of memory, but if you're up in the
64-128M range, my friends, the odds may be against you.
Take heart, though. Pyramid has been adjusting prices. Just a year
ago, a 4M memory board was almost $20000. Today, a 16M board is $40000.
Who knows what the pricing people upstairs will dream up next? There's
no way the prices could go up any further...
PS. Watch for a press announcement Pyramid's going to make in a few weeks.
--
Romain Kang, Pyramid Technology Corporation
US Mail: 10 Woodbridge Center Drive, Woodbridge, NJ 07095
Ma Bell: (201) 750-2626
UUCPnet: {allegra,cmcl2,mirror,pyramid,rutgers}!pyrnj!romain