Hello Lawrence.
28 Apr 98 19:47, Lawrence Garvin wrote to Mike Tripp:
 MT>> ... and expects they'll make back their money as one of few
 MT>> vendors that will still be supporting inexpensive 10mbit ISA as
 MT>> the competition races off into 100 mbit PCI in search of higher
 MT>> margins.
 LG> With 100mbit PCI cards in the $50 range.... and 100MB hubs in the
 LG> $50/port range... one is hard-pressed to imagine a continuing market
 LG> for 10Mbit ISA cards. Would you not agree?
Not touting their philosophy...just repeating it.   And their concern was ISA 
vs PCI not 10 vs 100...
My own thoughts concerning a continuing market for 10Mbit ISA is that there 
will be one for quite a few more years...in the SOHO/home market.  Internet 
access is easily the greatest current incentive to create a LAN in the 
residence where none previously existed.  These LANs are typically tiny (2-5 
systems).  Those systems have generally been accumulated over time and 
therefore came from several different generations of PC technology.  These 
LANs aren't going to saturate 10mbps and several of the devices they may want 
to share like ISDN routers or cable modems don't even have 100mbps interfaces 
since the bandwidth of the WAN link is already considerably slower than 
10mbps...as are peripherals that a home-user is likely to care about sharing 
(printers, modems, HDs, CDs, etc).
So for this market segment, the difference between $34 (NIC + port) and $100 
per machine is significant in light of "slim to none" improvement in 
"front-of-screen" performance...certainly nowhere near 3x.
 LG> Or perhaps the question should be, who, exactly, do they think their
 LG> "cheap end ISA 10Mbit/sec" market is? Even IF I was going to put a
 LG> 10MBit/sec ISA card in an older system, I'd surely be interested in
 LG> maximizing the use of that slow bus, and would opt immediately for a
 LG> 3Com Etherlink III card at $79 (or less), to insure best performance.
As did I, but you and I are probably not the marketing demographic they had 
in mind when they monopolized all the outstanding licensing arrangements for 
NEx000 boards. ;)
.\\ike
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