(fax) "Doing nothing?"

[Andrew]

Unfortunately, if you read Trevor's post again, he was talking about
server costs for things that use *free software*. All of that MS,
Oracle, Symmantec BS is what your costs will be, no doubt. Get rid of
those by using free software, and BAM, you just got rid of a large chunk
of it.

Andrew

On Fri, 2006-03-03 at 10:02 -0400, Dave Gilliss wrote:
> I was in "the industry" also and I'm guessing that you are down in the
> trenches (in the server room) and not part of the accounting/budgeting
> process. When I got promoted and left the server room I was rudely awaken by
> the cost of all the stuff that I was playing with down there. Just our
> licensing costs each year were over $3M (for MS, Oracle, Symantec, etc). I
> won't even get into the service contracts on our Dell clusters and Sun
> servers, tape libraries, and salaries. I know you said use linux for reduced
> costs, but someone still has to support this and on a project this scale
> you're going to have to have a lot of hardware and utility redundancy,
> massive data storage, stable power, geographically distributed datacenters,
> and backups, etc.  this ain't no basement project. If it was there would be
> a lot more serious competition to itunes store, but right now there isn't.
> 
> Also, you may want to check out Steve Job's salary. I know that since he
> returned he hasn't gotten a salary from apple, zero, nadda, zip. He may get
> a bonus (but I don't think he took it) but even if he did, he's earned it.
> He's got enough money from apple's glory days and from pixar. he came back
> strictly for pride and to spread his vision. Say what you will the guy has
> incredible foresight and he's always been ahead of the game, some times too
> far ahead (yep, I've still got my newton!).
> 
>  
> 
> Dave-G
> (who is happily out of "the industry" now)
> 
> PS, oddly enough, the total cost of your estimate is exactly what I paid for
> a Sun Timberwolf backup tape library with all the trimmings.
> 
> On 3/2/06 11:36 PM, "faxlist-request at 2350.org" <faxlist-request at 2350.org>
> wrote:
> 
> > Message: 2
> > Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2006 13:13:51 -0600 (CST)
> > From: Trevor Cordes <trevor at tecnopolis.ca>
> > Subject: Re: (fax) CDS ARE DEAD, Steve Jobs and Pete Namlook
> > To: Fax List <faxlist at 2350.org>
> > Message-ID: <200603021913.k22JDpnY010644 at pog.tecnopolis.ca>
> > Content-Type: TEXT/plain; charset=us-ascii
> > 
> > On  2 Mar, Warren Lapham wrote:
> >> "Doing nothing?" Do you have data to back up this assertion, or is
> >> this more anti-Jobs vitriol?  Servers and related infrastructure
> >> generally have a nonzero cost.  The same is true for the salaries of
> >> development teams and content management teams.
> > 
> > The hardware and software costs are negligible, believe me.  I could
> > lock myself in a room for 2 months and write the iTunes program.  I
> > could buy an off-the-shelf Beowulf server cluster for $100-$300k.  If
> > you use linux and manage things well, you can scale to huge proportions
> > at miniscule incremental costs.  Most people don't realize how cheap it
> > is to do this stuff; I do because I'm in the industry.
> > 
> > Even if you multiply my estimates by 10, you only have to look at the
> > stat that they've sold 1 billion songs at $1 each to see that even $3M
> > in "overhead" is waaaay less than 25% of $1000M.  Apple did NOT spend
> > $250M on overhead, trust me, unless the "overhead" is Jobs' salary.
> > (Remember, in corporate accounting, Jobs' salary would be part of
> > "overhead" and NOT "profit" as you would guess.)
> > 
> > I just think people should be informed of what gouging is actually going
> > on.  If they then decide that they don't care, then let them do what
> > they want, but don't call it "overhead" and make believe that it's not
> > mostly extra profit.
> 
> 
> 
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