Rambus Claims It Was Price-Fixing Target

conq writes "BusinessWeek reports on the latest developments in the Rambus/Micron saga over pricefixing." From the article: "One e-mail, dated June 5, 2001, from Micron Vice-President Linda Turner to other Micron employees was in response to worries about prices on DDR-DRAM that had been falling. 'No problem!,' Turner wrote. 'We want DDR to explode in the marketplace so have actually been requesting Infineon, Samsung, and Hynix to lower their DDR pricing to help it become a standard (and drive Rambus away completely).'"

Comments

Re:Rambus was overpriced and underperformed.

[Not_Wiggins]

I wonder how much they paid for that.

Probably nothing. Just because a company's blunder gives a competitor a leg-up doesn't automatically imply the competitor had anything to do with it.

If I recall, Intel was (ineffectively) trying to utilize their monopoly on the processor/motherboard market to "encourage" the Rambus memory standard. They did this because they had a huge financial stake in Rambus. If they had succeeded, I'm sure we would have seen a flurry of lawsuits (ala the Microsoft/Netscape debacle) against Intel.

It isn't unlike the missteps of other companies trying (and failing) to use their market strength to push a proprietary standard:

• IBM - Microchannel
• Apple - AAC encoding
• Sony - MemoryStick
• Sony - MiniDisc
• Sony - Blu-Ray (yet to be seen)