"So a small unfamiliar importer of HDDVD players is able to undercut all other HD DVD manufacturers on price, even the really huge makers with their own automated production lines? Gee, I wonder how they are able to do that? You don't suppose Microsoft has been swishing money around there too."
Same way they did for tape players, dvd players, and so on: Southeast asian sweatshop labor.
Big companies pay enormous amounts of money to develop technology and typically have higher salaries and more skilled labor in factories of first-gen products. After the first wave, they license the now-debugged technology to companies who don't have to recoup those cost and can pay people pennies.
Register
Price Economics
"So a small unfamiliar importer of HDDVD players is able to undercut all other HD DVD manufacturers on price, even the really huge makers with their own automated production lines? Gee, I wonder how they are able to do that? You don't suppose Microsoft has been swishing money around there too."
Same way they did for tape players, dvd players, and so on: Southeast asian sweatshop labor.
Big companies pay enormous amounts of money to develop technology and typically have higher salaries and more skilled labor in factories of first-gen products. After the first wave, they license the now-debugged technology to companies who don't have to recoup those cost and can pay people pennies.