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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).'"
"crashed email server" when you need it...
Twin or more? ITA
Apache/Spring/La
Let's just say that Linda Turner wasn't the fastest bit in the cache...
I still remember quite vividly the feud between Tom's Hardware Guide and Rambus that resulted in Rambus' stock price tumbling. Even if the other manufacturers kept their prices artificially low (which I doubt), Rambus was easily twice as expensive if not more than the same amount of DDR would have been. The fact that real world performance tests didn't back up the hype that Rambus promised was the nail in the coffin. If it was priced lower, they might have had something. I thought the technology had potential, but it's absurdly high price kept it from ever being realized.
... it was the fact that Rambus is SHIT
"PC800 RDRAM, which operated at 800 MHz and delivered 1600 MB/s of bandwidth over a 16 bit bus using a 184 pin RIMM form factor"
"Compared to other current standards, Rambus shows significantly increased latency, heat output, manufacturing complexity, and cost.[citation needed] PC800 RDRAM operated with a latency of 45ns, compared to only 7.5ns for PC133 SDRAM."
then squashed by
"DDR SDRAM, introduced in 2000, operated at an effective clockspeed of 266 MHz and delivered 2100 MB/s over a 64-bit bus using a 184 pin DIMM form factor."
not to mention needing CRIMMS or whatever they called the terminators
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDRAM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR_SDRAM
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
Is keeping prices artificially low actually illegal? Governments normally support anything that benefits the consumer.
Again.
If your product does not hit the market as it should, sue someone. Sue "Linux", to save your outdated product, sue your competitor for some meaningless patent hassle or, and here's the actually as far as I can judge ONLY new bit in this, some cartel building.
What happened to good ol' free commerce, where the best product makes the buck? Been coffined and buried by lawyers and marketeers long ago, I know...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...an executive at a company suggested that he (and his competetors) lower prices in order to entice more consumers to purchase his product over the opposing standard? Scandalous! Criminal charges should be filed immediately! It's un-American, I tells ya!
Rambus made this bed, now let them lie in it.
They made the mistake of trying to make a quick buck with their submarine patent, and they ticked off just about everybody. Including some very big players (Infineon, Samsung, Hynix, etc). This is just the big guys' way of exacting a very painful (and much-deserved) revenge. What the big memory makers did (assuming it's all true) may not have been legal, but boy, it sure feels good to see punks like Rambus writhe.
This ain't just business any more. It's personal.
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"The companies worked together to improve prices on a competing type of memory chip in order to discourage computer makers like Dell (DELL), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Gateway (GTW), and others from adopting a type of memory known as Direct Rambus Dynamic Random Access Memory (RDRAM) in their computers, and instead favor a competing type of memory chip known as Double Data Rate DRAM (DDR-DRAM)."
If RAMBUS wants to push this one, they have to reveal something beyond Micron et al attempting to lower prices for consumers across the board. If they could prove that their alternative had the same cost basis and Micron et all lowered prices solely to drive them out of business so they could all then simultaneously raise prices back up, and in fact did so, then they would have something, but it doesn't not sound like they had a cheaper solution or that Micron et al were losing money to drive them out of business to raise prices back up. Collusion is not illegal if it works in favor of consumers. I think a lot of people fail to realize that antirust laws and the like exist to protect consumers, not protect businesses from competition (which is why a government entity is the one who generally prosecutes antitrust cases "for the people").
First, IANAL. Second, if some would RTFA, they would realize the price fixing here involved LOWERING prices. Historically, to my knowledge, accusations of price fixing have normally been made when separate parties agree to not compete and keep prices at a certain level. Here we have SOME competitors ecouraging each other to lower their prices below that of a common enemy, possibly at a loss in order to make better profits down the road. Laws against price fixing are meant to encourage competition, and IMO this is competitive behavior. Am I wrong?
"Build something idiot proof, and someone will build a better idiot" - Samuel Clemens
Take a look at the prices of state-of-the-art SDRAM before and while RDRAM was on the market. Notice how 66Mhz 16- and 32MB SIMMs start out pretty expensive in the mid to late nineties, and are later replaced by equally expensive PC100 SDRAM. Then the price of PC100 SDRAM suddenly drops around 1999 to dirt cheap, and then the cheap PC100 is supplanted by equally cheap PC133, PC150, and PC200 SDRAM. Then just a short while later, really expensive DDR SDRAM with data rates in multiple gigabits per second hits the market and we've been paying for memory in a new higher price range than the old pre-RDRAM high price range ever since.
Now correlate that with the introduction and failure of RDRAM in the market and you'll see that PC100 prices dropped not long after it was introduced, and then fast, expensive DDR SDRAM came to market around the time RDRAM became irrelevant. Of course, that's just circumstancial. A lot of different market forces could have caused that kind of price movement.
RDRAM had a lot of technical problems with it. It did run hot, it did ride on funky slots, it was complex to manufacture, and for a variety of reasons, it cost a lot of money, not least because Rambus wanted to recoup the costs of developing the one advantage that RDRAM actually did have. That one advantage was that RDRAM was as fast as Intel's top-shelf CPUs. You could build a PC with a 400 Mhz Pentium II, a 400 Mhz FSB, a 400 Mhz north bridge, and a 400 Mhz memory bus leading straight into 400 Mhz memory, but only if that memory was RDRAM. Of course, 200 or 266 Mhz would have been just fine for most applications and even for most benchmarks. Matching speed with the CPU was overkill and Tom's Hardware knew it, among others.
The things that made RDRAM faster than contemporaneous commodity RAM were the patented designs of Rambus. Their problem was that they came to market seeking tech journo headlines at a time when the average PC consumer was fixated on the CPU speed, assuming that if they could match CPU speed with their RAM and get it written up, people would 1) stop fixating on CPU speed and 2) notice that commodity RAM wasn't cutting the mustard anymore.... and they overdid it, and overdoing it cost more than it needed to all the way down to retail.
Having said that, the evidence is only now coming to light that RDRAM wasn't killed by its own problems. It was killed by commodity RAM manufacturers flooding the market with cheap PC100 and PC133 RAM. So cheap that the cost curve of settling on the faster RDRAM part didn't make economic sense for most system integrators or their customers, despite the technical advantage. So RDRAM dies a quiet death of irrelevance around roughly 2002. Boo-hoo.
What happened next is the part that Rambus is currently seeking redress for. DDR SDRAM came to market, and we all know how it works and why it's exactly twice as fast as conventional SDRAM. What most people don't seem to understand is that RDRAM was DDR. That 400 Mhz RDRAM part actually used a 200 Mhz clock, and the FSB, north bridge, and memory bus of an RDRAM-capable motherboard were also DDR. Rambus developed DDR and holds the patent on it, among other things that have shown up in modern commodity RAM.
So let's recap. Rambus came to market with a problematic yet superior product which was ahead of its time in a market dominated by a few large manufacturers of commodity parts. The major manufacturers got in touch with each other to temporarily fix prices far too low to justify adoption of the problematic yet superior product which was ahead of its time. RDRAM became irrelevant, and the major manufacturers believed that Rambus had also become irrelevant. Once that happened they started using Rambus technology in their own products as the market needed it, while colluding to bump prices back up where they wanted them all along.
Since then, the post-RDRAM high price fixing has been proven in court. Rambus has kissed and made up with Infineon and Elpida with patent licenses and settl
vastly overpriced memory, based on a common manufacturer spec stolen from the consortium and patented to screw the rest of the industry.
anything that hurts rambus is OK in my book. you look up "screaming weasel" in the dictionary, you see their logo.
give those DDR guys a medal for a common spec, lower prices, and better performance. I will never own a rambus-loaded computer. it is the one thing I specifically check for.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?