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Any horror stories from not properly ventilating a MAME cabinet
Donkbaca:
You guys totally misunderstand the concept of economies of scale. Economies of scale have to do with advantages brought about through size that make production CHEAPER. If you were to use the above example, you could leverage your buying power and get those 10,000 fans for leas than 3 bucks a pop. Plus, if you were selling 10,000 of them you would totally take a hit if 30k because at 1,000 bucks a pop, you are talking about 10 MILLION dollars in revenue, 30k out of ten million is nothing. The only way a bean counter would get involved would be if there was some sort of cost benefit analysis thy would show that the projected warranty costs and lost good will from excluding the fan and making an inferior product would be less than the cost of adding the fan. That would involve hours of work and an engineer testing and evaluating a build with a fan and without. The cost of even DOING this analysis would be more than 30k. So no, it's not bean counting. Come on guys
ChadTower:
That's a nice theoretical explanation. It doesn't actually work that way in the real world. In the real world you get an arbitrary budget number to hit. You get technical requirements to meet. You start to work on the project and the requirements are increased. Then the budget office "matrixes" two of your resources so they are now 50% instead of 100%. Then another resource goes on unexpected 6 week leave to India. Then the requirements are increased again. The budget is never, ever increased. Corners get cut to meet the date. Often times the corners that get cut are the ones for which the analysis has not yet been done and do not directly affect functionality. Stuff like cooling fans.
SavannahLion:
--- Quote from: Donkbaca on July 01, 2011, 09:46:30 am ---You guys totally misunderstand the concept of economies of scale. Economies of scale have to do with advantages brought about through size that make production CHEAPER. If you were to use the above example, you could leverage your buying power and get those 10,000 fans for leas than 3 bucks a pop. Plus, if you were selling 10,000 of them you would totally take a hit if 30k because at 1,000 bucks a pop, you are talking about 10 MILLION dollars in revenue, 30k out of ten million is nothing. The only way a bean counter would get involved would be if there was some sort of cost benefit analysis thy would show that the projected warranty costs and lost good will from excluding the fan and making an inferior product would be less than the cost of adding the fan. That would involve hours of work and an engineer testing and evaluating a build with a fan and without. The cost of even DOING this analysis would be more than 30k. So no, it's not bean counting. Come on guys
--- End quote ---
Quit digging your own grave. By your argument there would be no incentive for cost reductions and refinements in production electronics outside of bug fixes. That kind of analysis (assuming any analysis was done by engineer at all) to reduce costs happens all the time. Why do you think there are something on the order of 12 board revisions for the 2600? The first Heavy Sixers worked beautifully. Yet even before the consoles release, Atari was cuttings corners. To take a more modern example: Why do you think Sony and Microsoft have multiple console revisions? To cut costs.
This goes right back to Muntzing (did you read that link I gave you?). 1/8 of a penny here. $3 here. Getting rid of a wire there. Consolidate a couple of ICs. Across half a million units of product X, by a company that probably produces millions or billions of units of a thousand different products all across the spectrum and those numbers add up.
SavannahLion:
I'm not debating donkbaca's purchasing in volume example but it paints an incomplete picture of what happens with large scale production and why a fan that details for $3 is potentially left out.
Donkbaca:
I am not saying that these things DON'T happen, but they don't happen to prevent putting on a 3 dollar fan and save 30,000 dollars. You are right, revisions happen all the time to cut costs, but you're idea of costs only has to do with components. MS revised the xbox so that it didn't RROD as easily, that cut costs because it reduced the warranty exposure that MS had. Costs get further reduced through... wait for it.. economies of scale, whereby a company, like MS, can use its negotiating power to negotiate better deals from suppliers. Costs also get reduced through mass production, the learning curve theory of production, there are LOTS of ways costs get reduced. What I am saying does NOT happen, at least in succesful companies, is that the end all be all in product design is done by some analyst or accountant saying, "you know if we just got rid of that 3 dollar component..."
Your whole argument is that cost cutting results in lower quality products, now you give an example, the xbox 360, where costs were cut and a SUPERIOR product was made. Another problem is that this is assuming that companies care mostly about cost, and they don't they care about profit. THe cost of inputs is just one component of cost.
If that three dollar fan REALLY was that important, then a competitor would think, " hey, we should add that fan to our $1,000 pc. Yeah it would increase the cost by 0.03% but it would give us and advantage over company Y because our machines would last longer. This is how MOST companies make it in this world, by competing on differentiation rather than just price, and when it comes to a lot of consumer goods, especially the more pricey ones, quality is more important to the consumer than price. Lets say this fan will increase the reliability and life of my product. I add the fan, sell it for $1,100 market it to people out there as, "buy my pc, it will last longer and be reliable." The utility we are talking about here that we are attributing to the fan; longer life and better stability; are worth a LOT to the consumer, we could EASILY charge a huge premium on this if it were true.
Believe what you want to believe