Rabid’s Rationale

OPINION: It’s 40 years now since that pesky young engineer Gordon Moore made his prediction that the power of technology would double every year at the same time as the price was getting halved.

Well, only an engineer could celebrate the annual slashing of cash flow as a direct consequence of the now famous Moore’s Law.

Yeah, alright, faster cleverer PCs every year is a good inducement to upgrade so we can get our hands on last year’s customers’ cash once again, but we also need to find twice as many punters or we’ll only have half last year’s money in the till.

I don’t know how things are going at your shop, but when Rabid was a lad IBM PCs cost about $10K each and 40 percent of that was going into the bank.

Now a half-decent PC costs less than a grand and about 5 percent of that is left over to pay the slaves and service the overdraft. Nobody working here now is familiar with the term ‘cash-in-hand’.

We know all about economic rationalisation from first-hand experience. Like the rest of the reseller
community we just got a press release from Intel patting themselves on the back for managing to stick to Moore’s Law and promising to do it again next year, and the year after, and the year after that ad nauseam.

Intel also pointed out that Moore had calculated that the number of transistors being shipped each year was about the same as the number of ants in the world. Gotta love such useful comparisons.
That was then but today it seems that each ant would now need to carry 100 transistors on its back to shift the annual global output from the semiconductor factories.

No wonder Pentium chips are so expensive. What logistics genius decided to use ants to move transistors around the factory?

We obviously can’t go on like this so it’s time to fight back. Here at Rabid Reseller we’ve decided to operate according to Rabid’s Rationale instead of Moore’s Law.

Rather than selling PCs by units we’re going to sell them by the transistor. Last year the technology industry produced more transistors than the agriculture industry produced grains of rice. We don’t want to seem unreasonable so we’ll only charge the same per transistor as it costs for a grain of rice.

Who could resist a deal that lets you buy transistors for only .001 cents each? Sure there’s quite a few of them in each Pentium chip, but let’s not get carried away with details here.

We won’t be expecting up-front payment of course, just authorisation to bill the customer’s credit
card for 100 transistors a day until the thing is paid off. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Meanwhile, we’re really excited about this new ILID technology. In case you’re not up to speed on this yet, ILID replaces those price-stickers on the shelves with an electronic version that gets updated via signals pulsed through the fluorescent lights in the store. I’m not making this up; I read it in The Fin so it must be true.

The marketing pitch is that you won’t have to go around changing sticker prices, you just update the cash register and it flashes the lights accordingly, and all the prices suddenly match what’s coming up on the screen.

Our early testing shows real potential in this system for dealing with those whiny customers who insist that we’re overcharging them for their toys at the checkout.

By the time they walk back to the shelf to demand that we sell at the advertised sticker price, we’ve told the fluoros what price we really want and lo and behold there it is staring Mr Whiny in the face.

The shock at being proven wrong immediately dissipates their natural inclination to refuse to pay the outrageous price. Muttering ‘I must be getting Alzheimer’s’, Mr Whiny just opens his wallet and hands over the cash.

As soon as he’s out of the store, a quick fluoro-flash and all the sticker prices are showing fantastic bargains again. You have to love technology, but we’re still not so keen on Moore’s Law.

Gotta go! Customers waiting!