Symbolics Germany prices

[eyvind%hrp.no@Warbucks.AI.SRI.COM (Eyvind Ness)]

   Date: Mon, 26 Aug 91 11:37:53 +0200
   From: Vincent Keunen <keunen@milou.nrb.be>
   Subject: Symbolics Germany prices
   To: SLUG@WARBUCKS.AI.SRI.COM
   cc: uucp%"ks@dfki.uni-sb.de"@nrbv01
   Message-ID: <19910826103636.3.KEUNEN@milou.nrb.be>

   We are also concerned by the high prices of Symbolics in Germany.  How
   come it's *twice* the price in the US?  I would be very surprised that
   taxes and transportation (+insurance, even) cost the price of the
   goods...  We need Symbolics machines, but at these prices, we are
   *forced* to look for alternative solutions, with the overhead of
   migrating.  We would just love to be able to buy production symbolics
   machines at the same prices as the other manufacturers machines...
   Wouldn't that make sense?  After all, Symbolics are great development
   machines, but they're not that good as regular production machines
   (performance, standardization, availability of third party
   peripherals...), so why charge that much?

   To give you an idea of the fun we have in Europe:
   - MacIvory model 2 processor board (40 bit Ivory processor, 8Mo NUBUS
   memory) => $25000 (approx)
   - Genera 8.0 Ivory dev system => $13000

   plus some 3 months delays before getting the latest versions (model 3,
   Genera 8.1,...

   How do you like that?

   Vincent Keunen
   keunen@nrb.be


I completely agree with you - Symbolics seems to be an American company,
for American customers. The support, prices, and delivery conditions in
Europe appears to be very different from the conditions in US.  I am
particularly disappointed with the near total lack of customer support
(e.g. no info about new releases, ridiculous maintenance costs, no SW
expertise etc. etc.).

As a consequence of this situation our company has just decided to cut
the HW maintenance of all boxes (except one) and to cut all SW
maintenance (non-existent in any case).

I think this is kind of sad. Symbolics has outstanding system SW with a
superior Lisp development environment. Unix-based alternatives still
appear clumsy and inelegant when compared with the Lisp machine.

Right now, I spend the time waiting for the *perfect* Lisp development
(and delivery) evironment for Unix boxes. Meanwhile, I'll have to make
do with Lucid and companions....

Eyvind Ness
eyvind@hrp.no