[asterisk-biz] PBX Functionality for Less than the Price of a KeySystem (3Com Asterisk IP Telephony Appliance)

[Tim]

Well this is getting silly

-----Original Message-----
From: Alex Balashov <abalashov at evaristesys.com>
Sent: Tuesday, June 03, 2008 5:58 PM
To: Commercial and Business-Oriented Asterisk Discussion <asterisk-biz at lists.digium.com>
Subject: Re: [asterisk-biz] PBX Functionality for Less than the Price of	a KeySystem (3Com Asterisk IP Telephony Appliance)

Alex Balashov wrote:

> The price can float more freely,
 > far less anchored to the underlying production costs.

To expand on this a little bit:

Say you want to be a wheat farmer.  Wheat doesn't have a lot of 
differentiation points that have a grandiose impact on price.  Sure, 
there are different types of wheat, grown under different conditions, 
and so on, but as much as they're different, they are also, in very 
significant ways, the same -- it's still wheat.  Wheat is wheat.

The agricultural processes involved in producing wheat are well-known 
and easily discoverable.  There are abundant quantities of wheat 
ubiquitously consumed across a broad swath of economic sectors and 
market segments, at all levels of income and so on.  So, the real 
question in going into wheat production is simply whether you want to do 
it -- that is, whether you want to and are able to make the investments 
in capital machinery, land, seed, and so on, and whether you can make it 
scale in a way that is competitive and make it efficient enough to 
compete with modern, high-volume agro-industrial conglomerates.

Aside from that, though, it's not really hard to figure out what the 
machinery costs, what the land costs, what the seed costs, and what kind 
of pricing your competitors are getting from this source, that source, 


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