Janine, What don't you buy? Other than the Kurzweil reader I mean ? :-) Sure Kurzweil came down in price. That's the market forces at work. Here's how it goes. At $10,000 a smack it is worth Arkenstones time and effort to come out with a comnpeting product which they can sell at half the price. What does Kurzweiler do? Do they walk away from this market or do they cut their prices and take a smaller profit? They take a smaller profit of course. They cut costs as needed and adjust to the new market conditions (i.e. a competitor). If you are convinced that Blazie products overcharges and has a poor quality product it is your right to compete against them with something better at a lower cost. Or it is your right to not buy their product. It is their right to charge whatever they want for their product. Once again it is the market forces which drive the price. Obviously there were enough customers willing to pay their price. Just as obviously their price was not so staggeringly high that it invited immediate competition. As far as Blazie's business model, obviously it was a good one if they could afford corporate jets. Beleive it or not, this too is not wrong. This is how private enterprise works and it does a damn good job of providing the goods and services that customers need and want. You talk about the component parts of a product as if they were the sum total of the product. They aren't. Take some flour, sugar and apples. Total cost of maybe fifty cents, but an experienced baker can turn those items into a mouth watering pie, while if they were given to me, I'd probably turn them into a product worthy of the trash can. If you think Papenmeyer (sp?) is overpriced, feel free to go into competetion with them using the freely available software and hardware components you itemized in your last post. Who knows. The competition may drive the price down. Rudy On Tue, Nov 13, 2001 at 05:34:42PM -0500, Janina Sajka wrote: > I don't buy it. Once upon a time Kurzweil scanning systems cost $10,000 > U.S. My employer, American Foundation for the Blind, worked with Kurzweil > to develop a loan program whereby blind people could buy this wonderful > technology. Fortunately, before we issued very many $10K loans, Arkenstone > came along at about $5,000. Immediately, Kurzweil figured out how to sell > its systems at the lower price. Of course, this was many years ago, but I > don't believe things have changed that muhc. > > For years, Blazie was the only game in town. So, they sold and sold, and > neglected to innovate. Thus, today's Blazie based devices are still little > more than mid-1980's technologies. Yet there prices have not dropped. > Regretably, the newer crop of devices seem to prefer holding the line on > price. I don't accept that. It's a travesty, in my view, as proven by the > Blazie folks who managed to get a couple of company Lear jets before > selling to Freedom Scientific for $15 Million. > > I've heard this all before, but what's so darned proprietary in these > products? The processors? Heck no. The memory? No, again. Perhaps the > ethernet and modem and parallel ports? No, again. Maybe the software? Not > speakup, which is free, or brltty, which is free, nor the os, which is > free, nor, likely, most of software inside the unit. > > So, I'm left with the box itself and its keys, and the marketing. But, the > parts involved cost less, and the price hasn't come down. That's wrong, > just plain wrong. > On Tue, 13 Nov 2001, A. R. Vener wrote: > > >