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Date: Sat, 22 Feb 2003 08:29:34 -0800
From: "Martin J. Bligh" <mbligh@aracnet.com>
To: Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>
cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@redhat.com>, lse-tech@lists.sf.et,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Minutes from Feb 21 LSE Call
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> That's all handwaving and has no meaning without numbers.  I could care less
> if Dell has 99.99% margins on their servers, if they only sell $50M of servers
> a quarter that is still less than 10% of their quarterly profit.  
> 
> So what are the actual *numbers*?  Your point makes sense if and only if
> people sell lots of server.  I spent a few minutes in google: world wide
> server sales are $40B at the moment.  The overwhelming majority of that
> revenue is small servers.  Let's say that Dell has 20% of that market,
> that's $2B/quarter.  Now let's chop off the 1-2 CPU systems.  I'll bet
> you long long odds that that is 90% of their revenue in the server space.
> Supposing that's right, that's $200M/quarter in big iron sales.  Out of
> $8000M/quarter.  
> 
> I'd love to see data which is different than this but you'll have a tough
> time finding it.  More and more companies are looking at the cost of 
> big iron and deciding it doesn't make sense to spend $20K/CPU when they
> could be spending $1K/CPU.  Look at Google, try selling them some big
> iron.  Look at Wall Street - abandoning big iron as fast as they can.

But we're talking about linux ... and we're talking about profit, not
revenue. I'd guess that 99% of their desktop sales are for Windows. 
And I'd guess they make 100 times as much profit on a big server as they 
do on a desktop PC. 

Would be nice if someone had real numbers, but I doubt they're published
except in non-free corporate research reports.

M.



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