Last week Dell Computers announced their plans to go private. Just this morning Microsoft announced its intention to buy Dell Computers. Two behemoths will join their forces to become one Leviathan.
Maybe you wondered, once upon a time, how Bill Gates and Michael Dell and a thousand other billionaires got so God damn rich. Most of the infinitely rich people in the world are in computer hardware or software, you know.
It all started, innocently enough, with the “doubling principle” of the early PC days. Each generation of computer processors was twice as fast and half as expensive.
This trend stopped about 10 years ago when Apple Computer started building “dual core” machines that had two of the same old processors instead of one brand new processor with a whole new architecture (designed by thousands of engineers working for years on end).
Apple got twice the processor speed without having to spend $1 billion to build a whole new fabrication facility (and another $1 billion for the engineering and the technology). Yet, they still got twice the price for their new machines. Twice the price for zero additional costs.
Software companies got in on the bandwagon. They built computer programs that parsed existing code that ran in single-processor machines so it would run on two parallel processors. No more billions of dollars for a small army of computer programmers. Easy money.
Egad! A whole new version of software that cost nothing to build. Better yet, they could charge twice the price. They would have made a 500% profit charging 10% of the price for the same product. But they got greedy, REALLY greedy.
Stupid us. We all assumed that faster machines should cost more. Faster cars cost more. Faster trains, plains and horses cost more, too. Why not computers? Faster software should cost more as well, going by same flawed logic.
Actually, your supercharged game computer uses 10 year old computer chips that cost pennies to make, not the thousands of dollars you paid for them. Ditto for your software.
Thus were made the likes of Bill Gates and his Microsoft fortune and Michael Dell’s Dell Computers fortune. All built on a house of cards and a global conspiracy to hide the truth from the consumers.
I want my money back!
