Re:Power9 to the People
by nine_k on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @11:16AM
(#15862231)
> our developer revenue stream.
This sounds terrible to me. From a POV of a platform vendor, the only "developer revenue stream" I'd care about would be popularity among developers. Give away the basic tools, sell slightly more specialized tools for the price of a pizza, get as many people hooked up as possible. Send your machines to universities at a discount. Sell older machines to hobbyists, and support the community. Help open-source projects run on your hardware and take advantage of its unique features (if any).
Of course, there is a niche to actually sell top-notch enterprise-grade tools for your systems, too, because corporations gladly buy support and stability. But this is usually a tiny trickle compared to the hardware sales, and its very existence is entirely dependent on your system being widely popular and ubiquitous.
As a bottom line, it's much better to get a 5% margin from a $100M market than a 25% margin from a $10M market.
This sounds terrible to me. From a POV of a platform vendor, the only "developer revenue stream" I'd care about would be popularity among developers. Give away the basic tools, sell slightly more specialized tools for the price of a pizza, get as many people hooked up as possible. Send your machines to universities at a discount. Sell older machines to hobbyists, and support the community. Help open-source projects run on your hardware and take advantage of its unique features (if any).
Of course, there is a niche to actually sell top-notch enterprise-grade tools for your systems, too, because corporations gladly buy support and stability. But this is usually a tiny trickle compared to the hardware sales, and its very existence is entirely dependent on your system being widely popular and ubiquitous.
As a bottom line, it's much better to get a 5% margin from a $100M market than a 25% margin from a $10M market.