Re: Minutes from Feb 21 LSE Call

Larry McVoy
2003-02-22T16:24:32Z

On Sat, Feb 22, 2003 at 08:29:34AM -0800, Martin J. Bligh wrote:
> > people sell lots of server. I spent a few minutes in google: world wide
> > server sales are $40B at the moment. The overwhelming majority of that
> > revenue is small servers. Let's say that Dell has 20% of that market,
> > that's $2B/quarter. Now let's chop off the 1-2 CPU systems. I'll bet
> > you long long odds that that is 90% of their revenue in the server space.
> > Supposing that's right, that's $200M/quarter in big iron sales. Out of
> > $8000M/quarter.
> >
> > I'd love to see data which is different than this but you'll have a tough
> > time finding it. More and more companies are looking at the cost of
> > big iron and deciding it doesn't make sense to spend $20K/CPU when they
> > could be spending $1K/CPU. Look at Google, try selling them some big
> > iron. Look at Wall Street - abandoning big iron as fast as they can.
>
> But we're talking about linux ... and we're talking about profit, not
> revenue. I'd guess that 99% of their desktop sales are for Windows.
> And I'd guess they make 100 times as much profit on a big server as they
> do on a desktop PC.

You are thinking in today's terms. Find the asymptote and project out.
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Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitmover.com/lm