Dean Kent (dkent@realworldtech.com) on 2/6/09 wrote:
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>Devon Welles (no@thanks.com) on 2/6/09 wrote:
>---------------------------
>
>>
>>Do you even know what "revenue" is? Seriously, it's becoming more of a mystery why you even bother to post here.
>
>Revenue is an interesting metric. If, for example, revenue increases 10% per year
>- does that mean 'increased market', or 'increased profit' or just 'increased revenue'
>with no context whatsoever, and therefore pretty meaningless. Did the cost go
>up, and therefore the price (so no additional profit)? Or did just the price go
>up, with no change in cost? Or were more units sold at the same price per unit?
>Or did the price per unit decrease, and there were a lot more units sold? And,
>what happened in the entire market - did revenue increase or decrease, and why (fewer
>units, reduced costs, difference in exchange rates)?
>
>Meaningless without context, really. People presume that price stays static, and
>therefore increased revenue means increased unit sales - but that isn't necessarily the case.
>
>If companies and people would discuss 'units', that might eliminate some of the
>arguing, because at least then everyone is (hopefully) talking about the same thing.
>
>Regards,
>Dean

During a recession having a metric to measure things is really complicated, because typical you see that some very seldom or weirdo junk sells really well during a recession

For example http://www.spykercars.nl sold MORE cars previous years and is going to sell even more this year from their exclusive hand made custom cars. Having such a car is really an unique experience.

Idemdito if you sell some dinosaur type hardware like itanium, you can expect that your sales do not suffer in the same manner from a recession like normal server sales do.

A normal server you can replace after a few years, but it sure can keep running for another few years. So when recession starts, you can delay buying a new one for a few years.

Not so long ago i was in a very big bank (i really must avoid quoting which one on the net) and i was a bit amazed to still see an OS run over there with software which i would qualify as being "from the start of the 90s", at most.

It is doing the job for them. Whether they work on with their standard components for another few years, or upgrade it to the latest TFT, that is a matter of budget.

Budget very limited there.

In times of recession seldom things like gold get worth more as a result of that.

Comparing such markets therefore with other markets is really hard.

If we're gonna see a few years from now new cpu's (nvidia?) that have teraflops worth of crunching power a chip, yet to program such that you can effectively use those teraflops very efficiently, it is going to be a huge challenge.

That means in short that x86/x64 hardware that focuses just upon being a faster x86 chip, it is something that's gonna be a market that you can sell to for at least another 25 years.

Vincent