From: cmaae47@cc.ic.ac.uk (Thomas Sippel-Dau)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
Subject: Re: How About a Word Processor with IRIX 4.0.X?
Date: 13 Apr 92 19:48:11 GMT
Organization: Imperial College Computer Centre

In article <1992Apr11.051348.12616@cs.yale.edu> dave@doctor.chem.yale.edu (David Maxwell) writes:

>  The Indigo is a wonderful machine, but SGI needs
>to look into how they market this computer.  I've been seeing ads everywhere.
>They are trying to market the entry Indigo against the higher end PC's, Mac's,
>and others.  I wouldn't trade my Indigo for anything, but I would like to
>see some changes.
>
>First of all, SGI has to realize that there are individuals who are buying
>the indigo.  Everytime I call SGI, they can't understand that I'm not
>affiliated with a company. It takes a little convicing for them to understand
>that I'm a graduate student. This is not a big deal, but it is a little
>annoying.  This brings me to my second point.  Most individuals cannot afford
>to pay $1200 for a much needed compiler.

Yes, we have gone through some negotiations with several vendors along similar
lines. The result is that people here can buy an Indigo for themselves under
similar terms as the college, and they can get software in the price range that
you quote. There are however some restrictions that people should understand:

  o  hardware maintenance must be bulked, and there must be some first line
     help in the college

  o  software help queries must go through a single (a few, in fact) person
     in the college

In other words, you get the machine with normal warranty, but without the 
"guy in a suit" to deliver it. For PCs there are similar well publicised
arrangements. It also seems to help if you (your institution) approaches
vendors with a plan to replace a mainframe by some 200 workstations.

>  I presume that I haven't been the
>only person who spent nearly all of their budget on just the system itself.
>I don't regret my decision to buy the indigo, but I wish that SGI would
>understand that $1000-2000 for one software package is quite a chunk of money
>for a individual.

No, you have not, we also find that research groups and even college
departments will sink any amount of money into fast CPU's and displays,
without deigning to budget for "frills" such as tape drives, ethernet
transceivers, backup media, air conditioning, tables of the correct height,
power cabling or adaequate disk space. On a lab of 10 Indigoes these can
easily amount to as much again as the Indigos themselves, and that will not
pay for digging new power supply channels into the concrete floor and laying
lush carpets.

There is, however, something that vendors should do, and that is to have a
useable standalone configuration with some software included in the price.
This should include a backup facility, installation manuals, extended parts
replacement maintenance and enough software.  The software might well be a
three out of ten menu (say), such that you get the operating system, and
some applications, which could be a compiler or publishing pack or debugger.

This should be the basic headline price, rather than what is now termed
"entry level" and usually does not run anything because it lacks memory and
comes diskless. This would give people (i.e. end users) a realistic price
comparison, and it would not at all be unfavourable for workstations as
opposed to PCs. Here (educational prices) we can offer people a useable base
386sx PC for about 2000 UK pounds, a 33 MHz 486 for 3500-4000 and an Indigo
for 8000. Even for non-exotic cars the price range is rather bigger and the
tickets higher, but they do come with a (somewhat) more transparent pricing
structure. Computers must follow the same rules sooner or later.

I do, however, query the wisdom of bundling everything that unix has aquired
over the years, as well as new wimp applications doing more or less the
same, but differently. Very often people just install things they are not
really capable of using and then delete them when they find they run out of
disk space for doing what they bought the machine for. I know that inst
allows you to install or reject bits separately, but even that choice is too
much (for me) to decide during the installation process whether I want the
stuff or can do without.

As a case in point, on my machine CodeVision comes in 13 installable images
(4 man and 9 sw), with 3125 system files to a total of 158 Mbytes (counted
with "versions -s CodeVision | tar -cf - - | wc -c"). Similar things can be
said for Explorer, NetVisualizer, Interleaf, X11, C and C++ development
systems, Showcase, SPSS, SAS, GLIM, Genstat, BMDP, Khoros, TeX and Metafont,
GNU-emacs etc., and somehow I doubt that a single user will want to even
afford the disk space to install that lot. 

                                      Thomas
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Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi