jeff@edai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton) (06/15/84)
--- Many seem ready to accept the claim that a system without, say, the C compiler should cost less than a system with it. However, the only thing that lies behind this is AT&T's decision to charge differently. (Surely the cose of the extra floppies is trivial; and the development costs not paid for years ago will be covered in any case.) All systems could be sold at the low price without losing sales (no one has to keep everything on line, and can just ignore what they don't want), but people with more elaborate needs may be willing to pay more. So instead of looking at this as a way for some customers to save money (AT&T being nice), it can be regarded as a way to charge other customers extra (AT&T trying to make more money). This is rather like hardware that runs at different speeds with different settings of a switch. Faster machines still cost more than slow ones, but the upgrade takes a lot less work :-). Certainly the manufacturer wins on this deal, but how is it an advantage to the customer?