I personally think they have done a pretty good job thus far. I loved that lapel pin! :-) At first I did not like the fact there were two versions, but have come to like it now though. Its still a great bargain considering what you are getting. Ever open up a Red Hat deluxe server box? There manuals and programs are pretty poor. Plus there are a few bugs that would have been noticed after 3 weeks of testing, finally there is the matter of there inclusion of a new gcc that will never be fully supported....All this leaves SuSE in a much stronger position! I can guarantee they have lost some large customers......Or in the process of losing them. Lets not confuse the market with a load of different SuSE packages, especially if you can buy a basic no bells and whistles CD for so cheap. Or indeed free with a magazine.... I am happy thus far with SuSE, especially as I managed to upgrade my P90 flakey server without any problems (so flakey it is only stable on a 386 kernel!). Redhat did not even install! One last thing I do dislike about Redhat is that it is arrogant distro too IMHO, to me claiming to have won the distro "war" and being number one really was pretty offensive. Matt PS I hope SuSE is glad that people are thinking up product ideas for free! Open Source production? :-) On Wed, 18 Oct 2000, Alan Lenton wrote:
I think you are all missing out something very important. (Apart from the fact that SuSE needs to make enuff money to pay it's staff!)
If the price is too cheap, then the retailers will simply not stock it. They expect ot make a certain amount of money on each unit of shelf they stock. If the price is too cheap, then the retailers can't make their margin so they go and look for a more expensive product to fill up their shelf space.
But that isn't all. Production companies deal with distributors not retailers, I don't know what SuSE's deal with its distributors is, but based on my experience in the computer boxed games industry a few years back, I would guess the distributors are getting it at about 50% and selling it on to retailers at 67% of retail price.
This has two implications. First SuSE are only getting half the money we pay over for the distribution, and second if there isn't enuff profit between the 50% the distributors pay for it and the 67% they sell it on for, or they won't take it.
I don't work for SuSE, so I've no idea what the actual figures are but I suspect that the ones I've given are in the correct ball park. Pricing a product is a lot more complex than it appears on the surface...
Alan Lenton
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