Comment Re: Markets, not people (Score 1) 615
The computer industry has seen a continual influx of new players. IBM was not the company driving prices down, it was the new players.
It should also be noted that the new computers are not drop in replacements for the old. Each new generation of computer could do things the old generation couldn't, making them effectively new products.
But IBM did bring prices down. In the 700/7000 series, each new model was more powerful, and more affordable, than the machine it replaced. Also, each was a "drop-in" replacement for the last. Even when IBM switched instruction sets for System/360, they had emulators that let you run your old software, so they continued to produce drop-in replacements. As late as the 1960s, Shell Oil was running software written for the IBM 704 using a 704 emulator for the IBM 709, itself running in emulation mode on a System/360 model 65. They had re-written the application for the new computer, but the new version gave different answers than the old, and people trusted the old program even though the new one gave arguably better answers.
Early in the industry, the upstarts established the pattern that each new generation would be more powerful than the old, and a steady influx of new players kept coming along to add fuel to the fire. Even as recently as 2005, there have been new brand name entries entries into the PC market such as alienware. There is a continual introduction of new asian no-name brands.
To be sure, IBM had competition from the "bunch": Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data and Honeywell. Later there were other competitors, such as DEC and Prime. However, your three-point economic theory of prices doesn't take them into account, assuming that the new entrants would maintain the same prices as the established players. That is a reasonable assumption, but it turns out not to be correct. At the time that the million-dollar IBM 7090 was the standard of the industry, DEC introduced the PDP-1 for $100,000. The PDP-1 could have sold for twice the price, so why did DEC forego the additional profit? I am guessing it was because they estimated the size of the market at each price point, and decided that $100,000 gave them the greatest total profit.
When the computer industry reaches maturity (The end of moores law), and each successive computer is not significantly different from the last, then there will be a culling of computer companies, and after that the prices will remain stable, even in the face of occasional reductions in manufacturing cost.
You are speculating about a time that is very far in the future.
A better place to look would be consumer electronics like DVD players and the like. A typical DVD player costs about $20 to make. They still sell for $100ish, a healthy margin. These could come down a lot, but none of the incumbent companies have any interest in dropping the prices for greater market share because it would be a race to the bottom. Every so often you see walmart causing some price reductions by introducing off brand asian devices at significantly reduced prices, but Walmart is in a unique monopoly position that almost no other company in history has enjoyed. Walmart has produced the price reductions that we would otherwise expect from a free market economy, but they have to abuse their monopoly position to do it (brow beating suppliers by refusing to carry their products otherwise). If Walmart had instead chose to maintain slightly higher prices, they could have pocketed a large portion of that profit for themselves (oh wait, they did...).
DVD players are unusual because they are heavily regulated by patents. If you tried to sell a DVD player that you build in your garage you would get sued into oblivion unless you paid the DVD rights holders for every unit you sell. That wasn't, and isn't, true of computers, though not for lack of trying. When DEC introduced the PDP-6, they got a letter from IBM threatening a lawsuit because the PDP-6 was a multi-register computer, and IBM had patented the concept when they brought out the IBM 1620. (This was before System/360.) DEC laughed and discarded the letter.
Your three-point economic theory of prices doesn't take into account irrational actors, as I have pointed out in previous replies, and does not consider that a rational player may reduce his price because he calculates that a lower price will expand the market, thus earning a greater total profit. Still another reason for a price decrease is the introduction of a product from a different market sector. I saw this happen with computer monitors. Until the 1970s they were very expensive. When consumer-grade television sets were able to be used as computer monitors, the price fell through the floor. The TV manufacturers saw a small increase in their market, and the computer industry switched from teletypes and communicating typewriters (the IBM 2741) to visual display terminals.
Thus, I think your three-point economic theory of prices is over-simplified.