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jashsu said:
> So that leaves a motivation for Amazon to price it at $50.
"motivation"? what does that have to do with the price of tea in china?
sure they have "motivation" to sell a $50 machine, but if no one can
_build_ a machine at that price, what good does that "motivation" do?
***
on the question of mounting your own content, _no_company_
will ever sell a machine on which you can't load your own stuff.
since no one would even take a second look at such a machine.
since the first e-book-machine -- the rocketbook -- was released,
the #1 f.a.q. has been "can i put my own content on this machine?"
if it's not possible, at all, you're not gonna make very many sales.
however, i could see a company attempting to _charge_extra_
for the "privilege" of loading your own content. of course, they
wouldn't be so stupid as to piss us off by phrasing it that way.
instead they'd offer a "steep discount" for a hobbled machine that
only accepted their own content (overpriced, to offset the subsidy).
and for _some_ people, that particular tradeoff might be worth it.
(specifically, people who had no desire to load their own content,
and only wanted to buy the bare minimum from that company.)
whether it would be _enough_ people to make it worthwhile for
the company, i'd have _serious_ doubts. but who really knows?
after all, this _is_ the model that the game consoles are using, and
they seem to be making lots of money. except for the wii machine,
the other big ones (sony's ps3 and microsoft's xbox) are _heavily_
subsidized. the ps3, which sells for $500, actually costs over $800.
sony expects to make the money back when customers buy games.
and microsoft has lost billions (literally) on its xbox over the years
-- hardware-wise -- although, if i remember correctly, they have
finally turned the corner on profitability by selling enough games.
and here's where we get to the crux of the matter.
sony and microsoft are the only parties that can sell the games that
play on their systems. that is, they have a monopoly on the content.
so they can charge (or overcharge) whatever they want for the games.
sure, nobody has to buy a game. but what good is the console then?
that monopoly is the reason they can overcharge for the games,
and that allows them to use the games to subsidize the consoles.
but that approach will not work for e-book-machines, because
the makers of the e-book-machines have no content monopoly.
even if you could force all the publishers to go through you
-- even if you gave them a big enough share of the money
that they were _completely_ecstatic_ to work through you --
the end-users would _still_ want to load their own content...
some of them might _never_ buy one thing from you. _ever_.
so you'd have to require them to make at least some purchases
from you, enough to make up for the discount on the hardware.
***
there's another set of important variables running around here,
but this post is long enough, so i'll save them for the next one...
-bowerbird
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