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'White Box' Makers Take Up The Slack
n3hat writes: "This story in the business section of the Baltimore Sun points out that the 'pooter bidness isn't as bad as the publicly-traded companies report. Seems that as much as 45% of systems are assembled by screwdriver shops and other white-box makers, not the big guys." No huge surprises here.
the word is usually spelled "surprises"
sean
Then again, the original ghetto slashdot has got to be Afrodot
Please, learn how to use an apostrophe and/or 's' for everyone's sake:
Usage: Possessive
Example: Mary's coat.
Explanation: The apostrophe and 's' here are used to indicate that the coat belongs to mary. Leaving the apostrophe off would indicate that there are several Mary and they are some sort of coat, quite confusing if I might add.
Usage: Plural
Example: Leaves on a tree.
Explanation: The 's' is used here to indicate that there are several leaves (more than one). Please note that there can not be an apostrophe on leaves, since the verb 'on' is usually not used possessively (as most verbs are not used possessively).
Usage: Contraction
Example: It's a nice day today.
Explanation: Notice in this expample that if you think of the apostrophe 's' as a possessive usage, the sentence is quite confusing (the object 'it' has an 'a' which is then the object of 'nice day today' - huh?). The 'It's' is part of a special family of words called contractions in which two words are shortened into one word (for pronuciation purposes I believe - such as in Spanish and the combination of 'de el' into 'del'). Only certain combinations of words can be shortened under this contraction method, and generic nouns typically can not be shortened. I believe proper nouns such as AMD and Intel can never be contracted. Also not that when using a possessive 'it' the additional 's' does not include an apostrophe.
Your paragraph should have been:
A part is a part. Intel should be overselling its predictable sales by 100% if half the computers are jobbed. AMD is doing no better (and may be losing market share, meaning it's losing unit sales even faster than Intel).
These guys have no real competition.
So if the market is still so healthy, why can't they sell parts?
An interesting tale of moderate in this thread:
The original post asks: if it is true that the computer market is still fine, it's just that sales are shifting from brand-name makers to white-box makers, why don't the statistics we are seeing from Intel and AMD reflect a healthy market? If it's just the brand-name makers who have a weak computer market, but white-box sales are up and are making up for the weakness in the brand-name market, why are overall CPU sales still weak?
Ok, that gets modded 4, Insightful, as it should.
dboyles responds that the reason CPU sales are weak is because people no longer need to upgrade - they can do everything they want with a four year old machine still.
This is a good point, but it is not at all related to the point originally being made, which is that if white-box sales really are making up for weak brand-name sales, the CPU makers' statistics should show this, but are not. Moreover, dboyles' point isn't even related to the point in the article.
dboyles' posts gets a 5, Insightful, higher than the original post.
MtViewGuy responds by reiterating dboyles' point that old computers are already fast enough for most computers, and then makes the additional point that if you do need a faster computer, you can just upgrade your existing computer instead of buying a new one. This is a valid point, except that it does not actually explain the weakness in the computer market. After all, are upgrades cheaper relative to the cost of a new computer now than they used to be? Are more people comfortable with upgading their own computers now than used to be? These factors would have to be determined (SlugLord speaks to one of them in another thread) before we could know if the ability to upgrade our computers had anything to do with the weakness in the computer market.
Moreover, because MtViewGuy specifically mentions upgrading by buying a new CPU, he doesn't answer to blair1q's original post - which is that if only the brand-name market is weak, then why are CPU makers' sales weak too. If people are upgrading by buying new CPUs, then CPU makers' sales would still be strong even though brand name sales of boxen were down.
MtViewGuy's post is moderated as 3, Informative.
jedrek posts saying that existing computers are already powerful enough for most people, repeating the point made by MtViewGuy and dboyle.
jedrek gets moderated 3, Insightful.
asv108 tries to contradict blair1q's original post by saying that people who build custom boxes use AMD, not Intel, therefore the fact that Intel's sales are weak does not show that the overall computer market is weak, not just brand-name manufacturers. This would be an ok point, except that he relies on selective quoting. He quotes blair1q saying "Intel should be overselling its predictable sales by 100% if half the computers are jobbed." But he ignores blair1q's next sentence: "AMD's doing no better (and may be losing market share, meaning it's losing unit sales even faster than Intel)." This sentence, of course, disproves asv108's whole point.
asv108's post has a score of 2.