Consoles & Propoganda

[-tkf-]

I did read the interview and again the relevence to cheap labor means what exactly? They aren't building the ps3 here or in EU, so "cheap labor" is irrelevant to the Euro Launch.

I think you should start somewhere else, the pay is higher in the EU, the guy handing you the PS3 costs more, the guys importing the stuff costs more, the whole setup from support to translation to transport is more costly, and the taxes are higher as well. All goods are generally more expensive, including those imported from China. Labor costs is not just those that produce the goods, it´s also those that handle and support it.

http://www.oanda.com/products/bigmac/bigmac.shtml

 

[TheChefO]

All goods are generally more expensive, including those imported from China. Labor costs is not just those that produce the goods, it´s also those that handle and support it.

http://www.oanda.com/products/bigmac/bigmac.shtml

Agreed.

Doesn't change the relationship of their cost to their competition. Or the original statement.

Foot-In-Mouth disease

The proper thing to say is. "Everything is expensive in EU".

not

"The US is a massive land with cheap people"

 

[-tkf-]

Agreed.

Doesn't change the relationship of their cost to their competition. Or the original statement.

"The US is a massive land with cheap people"

He didn´t say that, i guess you just want to keep your sig even if it´s totally wrong.

If you take what's considered to be the most expensive and the least expensive – consider the US with its massive land and cheap people. Then you look at the UK – a little island where rent and rates are at an absolute premium, and the cost of people is a lot more.

So in the relation to the competition, the PS3 still costs more, but in my country it´s Microsoft that is breaking the pattern. The 360 is seems very cheap here, and i would guess it has more to do with Microsoft trying to break ground. The wii is around 360$ and the XBOX 360 is around 500$ (premium) the price on the XBOX should be higher compared to the WII and the PS3 (900$).

 

[Gubbi]

Thanks for the feedback SMM. To generalize, it has been frequently noted that Xenon (and the Cell PPU to a degree) have significantly less cache than their PC counterparts and that this could pose serious performance issues, especially Xenon which would have less than 512KB per core (compared to something like C2D with 2MB per core). IMO this is an oversymplified arguement and ignores the differences in task and market but the amount of cache, specifically the lack thereof, has been a point mentioned on the forums quite often over the last couple years.

As important as the amount of level 2 cache is the associativity of it, especially for a multi-cored device , -and even more so when each core is multi-threaded. Each CPU context generally has three segments, code, stack and heap.

To get any kind of reasonable performance you need good hitrate in your instruction caches since you feed the front of the pipeline and has little room to dodge dependecies here (other than switching context). So I-fetch has to operate mostly from I$ or you're screwed anyway.

The stack segment usually sees exceptionally good hitrates because of the high level of spatial and temporal locality.

This means that the level 2 cache has to primarily deal with heap data. Usually you'd want at least one way per CPU context to avoid the most obvious pathological case where each context thrashes the content of the L2 for the other contexts.

The Xenon cache hierarchy seems fairly well designed. Each core supports two contexts for a total of six for the entire device. The L2 cache is eight way associative, and therefore should serve all six contexts if they are fairly well behaved.

Likewise each core has a 4-way associative L1 D$ supporting a stack and heap segment for each of the two contexts.

As for the amount of L2 cache. Yes, a C2D has more cache, but each core is also a lot faster (don't be fooled by the mega bollocks per second numbers) - and with a higher latency main memory system that means that each miss is relatively much more expensive, hence it makes sense to add cache to lower miss rates.

On top of that game developers are already focused on a whole bunch of other performance related problems like instruction scheduling and vector unit intrinsics and damn well better keep an eye on cache miss rates and memory footprint/behaviour in general (ie. are more likely to use non-temporal loads and stores to avoid polluting the caches with data with poor locality)

Cheers

 

[TheChefO]

He didn´t say that, i guess you just want to keep your sig even if it´s totally wrong.



So in the relation to the competition, the PS3 still costs more, but in my country it´s Microsoft that is breaking the pattern. The 360 is seems very cheap here, and i would guess it has more to do with Microsoft trying to break ground. The wii is around 360$ and the XBOX 360 is around 500$ (premium) the price on the XBOX should be higher compared to the WII and the PS3 (900$).

Ok, what is he saying with that statement in your opinion?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

The proper thing to say is. "Everything is expensive in EU".
not

"The US is a massive land with cheap people"

Why are things cheap in the US? Because the people there won't pay more. Imagine there's 4 friends : Andy, Barry, Charlie and Derek. All earn about the same amount of money. Whenever they go out - to the Footy, to a restaurant, to a musical - Andy, Barry and Charlie pay up, and Derek argues the ticket sellers down on price. How would you describe Derek?

From a business POV, which isn't the one any forumite listens to spokespersons with although the spokesperson may be used to talking in those terms, the statement may not be politcally correct but it can be seen as valid. It's absolutely true that when pricing for the US, you have to be willing to cut profit margins - they're far more price sensitive. If he was talking in a boardroom of Sony execs, saying 'this is a cheap nation' would be a pretty ordinary thing. May well have got the same sort of thing from other console boardrooms. Obviously the guy shouldn't talk that way in public if it's going to get some backs up, which is the reason companies have PR people to give interviews rather than managers. However GI.biz is a more of a business site and the guy was giving a business interview - like many an MD it wouldn't be surprising if he was just talking frankly.

The problem here is one of ears being where they shouldn't, and listeners expecting everyone to never to make any PR slip-ups wihtout considering who that person is and how their use of language is going to differ from the trained PR types. I wonder how many people here could do those jobs and answer those sorts of questions without dropping any clangers at all, especially when the clangers dropped aren't anything bad at all in your own sphere of activity? It's like having microphones on a football pitch and then complaining about hearing players swear. They've been swearing for years. You can't expect them to suddenly change their behaviour to adapt to a new invasive audience.

 

[TheChefO]

Why are things cheap in the US? Because the people there won't pay more. Imagine there's 4 friends : Andy, Barry, Charlie and Derek. All earn about the same amount of money. Whenever they go out - to the Footy, to a restaurant, to a musical - Andy, Barry and Charlie pay up, and Derek argues the ticket sellers down on price. How would you describe Derek?

From a business POV, which isn't the one any forumite listens to spokespersons with although the spokesperson may be used to talking in those terms, the statement may not be politcally correct but it can be seen as valid. It's absolutely true that when pricing for the US, you have to be willing to cut profit margins - they're far more price sensitive. If he was talking in a boardroom of Sony execs, saying 'this is a cheap nation' would be a pretty ordinary thing. May well have got the same sort of thing from other console boardrooms. Obviously the guy shouldn't talk that way in public if it's going to get some backs up, which is the reason companies have PR people to give interviews rather than managers. However GI.biz is a more of a business site and the guy was giving a business interview - like many an MD it wouldn't be surprising if he was just talking frankly.

The problem here is one of ears being where they shouldn't, and listeners expecting everyone to never to make any PR slip-ups wihtout considering who that person is and how their use of language is going to differ from the trained PR types. I wonder how many people here could do those jobs and answer those sorts of questions without dropping any clangers at all, especially when the clangers dropped aren't anything bad at all in your own sphere of activity? It's like having microphones on a football pitch and then complaining about hearing players swear. They've been swearing for years. You can't expect them to suddenly change their behaviour to adapt to a new invasive audience.

That market difference can be described in one simple word: Taxes

You guys pay a "lot" for things because taxes which are relatively large in comparison to the US, are included in said price. The U.S. does not include the tax (~7% most places) in the MSRP.

Hence the difference.

Not, we're a bunch of cheapskates and Euro's like paying lots of money.

It's basic, and the statement was targeted to a specific people for a specific response.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

That market difference can be described in one simple word: Taxes

No, it's not all taxes. The difference in prices between markets does not come down 100% to taxes. So places are more expensive to live (high cost of living = need for more income = higher pricing when selling stuff - higher cost of living). Companies know they can charge more in some markets than others, and in some cases, know they have to charge more in some countires (as the interview explained). Look at Apple's iTunes prices for an example.

Not, we're a bunch of cheapskates and Euro's like paying lots of money

No one likes paying a lot of money. The difference is some markets have built up a tolerance for high prices, which as I understand was due to very strong capitalism creating markets constantly trying to offer a cheaper product/service. Are Americans 'cheap' or are they sensible and Europeans 'stupid suckers' to pay too much? Depends entirely from which direction you're coming from, but it's the same thing. US is less willing to spend money on items. If a TV or washing machine or beef-burger or cup of coffee was the same price in the US as various EU countries, ignoring sales tax (other taxes of course contribute to the higher cost of living), it wouldn't sell. Things have to be sold at a cheaper price over there relative to Europe.

It's basic, and the statement was targeted to a specific people for a specific response.

Yes. It was a statement to a journalist of a business site talking about Sony's approach to the EU and reasons for price differentials. Though I don't know what you mean by a specific response? Are you saying he deliberately called the US 'cheap' to offend you? I mean, that'd be an amazingly stupid thing to do. If it was a Foot-in-Mouth incident, a blunder, than it was worded for a specific response.

 

[dobwal]

Why are things cheap in the US? Because the people there won't pay more. Imagine there's 4 friends : Andy, Barry, Charlie and Derek. All earn about the same amount of money. Whenever they go out - to the Footy, to a restaurant, to a musical - Andy, Barry and Charlie pay up, and Derek argues the ticket sellers down on price. How would you describe Derek?

From a business POV, which isn't the one any forumite listens to spokespersons with although the spokesperson may be used to talking in those terms, the statement may not be politcally correct but it can be seen as valid. It's absolutely true that when pricing for the US, you have to be willing to cut profit margins - they're far more price sensitive. If he was talking in a boardroom of Sony execs, saying 'this is a cheap nation' would be a pretty ordinary thing. May well have got the same sort of thing from other console boardrooms. Obviously the guy shouldn't talk that way in public if it's going to get some backs up, which is the reason companies have PR people to give interviews rather than managers. However GI.biz is a more of a business site and the guy was giving a business interview - like many an MD it wouldn't be surprising if he was just talking frankly.

The problem here is one of ears being where they shouldn't, and listeners expecting everyone to never to make any PR slip-ups wihtout considering who that person is and how their use of language is going to differ from the trained PR types. I wonder how many people here could do those jobs and answer those sorts of questions without dropping any clangers at all, especially when the clangers dropped aren't anything bad at all in your own sphere of activity? It's like having microphones on a football pitch and then complaining about hearing players swear. They've been swearing for years. You can't expect them to suddenly change their behaviour to adapt to a new invasive audience.

Thats the problem, Sony has a bunch of people doing PR which isn't their primary function. Sony generates about just as much negative publicity as it does positive publicity from a PR perspective. A interview used as a opportunity to stress the positive aspects of the PS3's launch in the UK was wasted on a comment that the US was a "massive land of cheap people" (based on GNI per capita from 2005, the US outranks the majority of Europe including the UK). Even if its unintentional, it seems amatuerish in the least.

If you going to stand in the public eye and represent your company you should have the wherewithal to speak and interview in a way that won't generate negative publicity. Its not like these are hard hitting interviews where the interviews is delibrately trying to unnerve the PR people to elicit embarassing responses.

 

[TheChefO]

Yes. It was a statement to a journalist of a business site talking about Sony's approach to the EU and reasons for price differentials. Though I don't know what you mean by a specific response? Are you saying he deliberately called the US 'cheap' to offend you? I mean, that'd be an amazingly stupid thing to do. If it was a Foot-in-Mouth incident, a blunder, than it was worded for a specific response.

Agreed on the cost of living but this exists within the US as well as everywhere else in the world. Take a trip to Hawaii for a US example.

The specific purpose was to establish an elitism for their product and their price. And yes it was a blunder. Along with many of their other foot-in-mouth statements.

 

[TheChefO]

Thats the problem, Sony has a bunch of people doing PR which isn't their primary function. Sony generates about just as much negative publicity as it does positive publicity from a PR perspective. A interview used as a opportunity to stress the positive aspects of the PS3's launch in the UK was wasted on a comment that the US was a "massive land of cheap people" (based on GNI per capita from 2005, the US outranks the majority of Europe including the UK). Even if its unintentional, it seems amatuerish in the least.

If you going to stand in the public eye and represent your company you should have the wherewithal to speak and interview in a way that won't generate negative publicity. Its not like these are hard hitting interviews where the interviews is delibrately trying to unnerve the PR people to elicit embarassing responses.

QFT

 

[Bobbler]

Why are things cheap in the US? Because the people there won't pay more. Imagine there's 4 friends : Andy, Barry, Charlie and Derek. All earn about the same amount of money. Whenever they go out - to the Footy, to a restaurant, to a musical - Andy, Barry and Charlie pay up, and Derek argues the ticket sellers down on price. How would you describe Derek?

Reading the entire couple sentences where that little snippet came from... it doesn't look like it's talking about people not wanting to pay for things... rather the cost of people to get the product on the shelves.

If you take what's considered to be the most expensive and the least expensive – consider the US with its massive land and cheap people. Then you look at the UK – a little island where rent and rates are at an absolute premium, and the cost of people is a lot more.

That's the full quote -- it would have been better had he clarified "cheap people" as "the cost of people/labor is lower" in the first sentence... if you read the entire thing, that's the context that it is given when he makes the UK comparison (as he states "the cost of people is a lot more"). Chef's interpretation/sound bite version seems completely out of context and is a rather large issue on the internet -- oddly, it was part of what was talked about in that interview (misinterpretation and lack of even checking to make sure that's the case).

-tkf- pretty much explained it.

 

[TheChefO]

Reading the entire couple sentences where that little snippet came from... it doesn't look like it's talking about people not wanting to pay for things... rather the cost of people to get the product on the shelves.


That's the full quote -- it would have been better had he clarified "cheap people" as "the cost of people/labor is lower" in the first sentence... if you read the entire thing, that's the context that it is given when he makes the UK comparison (as he states "the cost of people is a lot more"). Chef's interpretation/sound bite version seems completely out of context and is a rather large issue on the internet -- oddly, it was part of what was talked about in that interview (misinterpretation and lack of even checking to make sure that's the case).

-tkf- pretty much explained it.

Disregard the orange square for a moment and tell me then why Japan was not used as a reference as the console is SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper there?

Not to mention: his words, not mine. These guys are in the public eye and are payed well (especially this guy, being in the EU and all) to do a job.

 

[-tkf-]

That market difference can be described in one simple word: Taxes

You guys pay a "lot" for things because taxes which are relatively large in comparison to the US, are included in said price. The U.S. does not include the tax (~7% most places) in the MSRP.

Hence the difference.

Not, we're a bunch of cheapskates and Euro's like paying lots of money.

It's basic, and the statement was targeted to a specific people for a specific response.

There is more to it, but it would require you to realise that your sig is worthy of the Inq. We are paid more in europe (the 12 original EU countries at least so don´t get started Ostepop), our salary is higher, we have more buying power (in numbers), but higher salery also means goods are more expensive, the US has "cheap people" (labor) making their buying power weaker. but it also makes it cheaper to sell goods in the US. By your standard every manufactor of goods is trying to fuck the europeans over. The minimum wage in .dk is something like 2100$ a month (37 working hours pr week) how much is the minimum wage in the US ?

 

[LogisticX]

I'm sorry but only a complete fanboy would keep tabs on all the apparent "blunders" a company's spokesperson(s) would make and quote them as some kind of badge of honor.

How do you expect to be taken seriously when its completely obvious that you have no intention of actually looking or discussing things in an objective manner? This is what I cannot understand of these boards.

Why do people tolerate this garbage? I'm not jumping on Chef's back because he doesn't prefer Sony's products or, more to the point, because he prefers MS' products. Its that his input consistently brings down and steers the topics away from what they're supposed to be about particularly when they don't pertain to Xbox topics.

Saying something negative and then saying "i'm still looking forward to how this turns out" or putting 50 million smilies next to it doesn't make things better. Chef doesn't have an interest in being civil, that much I can guaran-damn-tee.

 

[Bobbler]

Disregard the orange square for a moment and tell me then why Japan was not used as a reference as the console is SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper there?

Not to mention: his words, not mine. These guys are in the public eye and are payed well (especially this guy, being in the EU and all) to do a job.

I don't quite understand your point... US could have been replaced with Japan and it would have made as much sense (except he'd have had to say small area with cheap people). An example with US and JP could have been made as well with his wording and it could have applied as well -- it probably was quite significally cheaper for Sony to release PS3 in JP than it was in the US, and both of those quite a bit cheaper than bringing it to EU. It was a rationalization (what would you expect a PR person to do?), but your interpretation of the sentence and cherry picking a single phrase is pretty terrible.

JP gets a cheaper 360 and PS3 than any other place. Part of it has to do with the price people will pay (not what he was pointing out) and part of it has to do with outside costs associated with bringing it to market there (what he was talking about in those two sentences). I've never heard of a company that thinks bringing a product to market in EU is fun and games compared to other regions of the world -- it's more expensive per unit sold and more difficult than most other areas around the world.

FYI using "his words, not mine" is absolutely not an excuse for being disingenuous.

 

[Todd33]

Correct me if I'm wrong but they can afford to sell PS3s cheap in the Japan because they are assembled in Asia and their is no import cost or loss in currency exchange.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

If you going to stand in the public eye and represent your company you should have the wherewithal to speak and interview in a way that won't generate negative publicity.

The problem is the appearance of a new publicity to interviews. How many comments to the WSJ in the 80s were reported to end consumers buying products? Comments from MD's back then were only read by business folk who understood the business talk. You could talk about how you were fleecing one bunch of people (read 'making large profits on investment through high profit margins') and your readers wouldn't take offense, because they wouldn't include the market you're selling to. Nowadays, notably with the consoles )although I don't hang out at Washing Machine and Coffee Store forums to see how they are and they might be just the same), anything on the internet becomes mainstream public.

It's might be right to say that people going into interviews should be prepared and fully accountable in what they say, but I don't think at the moment we can expect that level of public relations sense throughout every senior exec interview. They have more important things to do than worry about interview technique. Or perhaps they don't? Perhaps now one of their main functions, no matter what role they play, is to further the corporate image?

That's the full quote -- it would have been better had he clarified "cheap people" as "the cost of people/labor is lower" in the first sentence... if you read the entire thing, that's the context that it is given when he makes the UK comparison (as he states "the cost of people is a lot more").

Yep, although I think that's pretty much the same thing, at least in part. Cost of people is only a part of the equation. That'll add to PS3's cost in terms of distribution and retail staff. That alone is not going to account for $200 per unit more expense in the UK! Especially considering the longer distance of haulage to distribute throughout NA. There is definitely a pricing strategy marking up for the EU because people are used to paying higher prices. I mean, if you can sell a can of Coke for 30p at a good profit, why sell it at 30p when everyone else sells it at 45p? That's the price everyone is used to, so it's the price they're willing to pay, and if you care about maximizing profits (how many businesses aren't?!) that's how you pitch your price. 'Cheap' has quite a wide reach, and personally I don't think he was only talking about people costs. Certainly if that's all he meant, it's an inaccurate explanation for PS3's price - which might be the case, blaming it on costs rather than admitting to higher pricepoints because the market is more accomodating (as previous comments have said of the EU!)

JP gets a cheaper 360 and PS3 than any other place. Part of it has to do with the price people will pay (not what he was pointing out) and part of it has to do with outside costs associated with bringing it to market there (what he was talking about in those two sentences).

And part is facing competition and wanting to drive sales. Selling XB360 at the same price in Japan as the US is crazy as demand is lower in Japan. You need to adjust the price to fit demand - if it's not selling, perhaps a lower price will attract customers? And as these are international markets, most people aren't botherd by it. If you want to buy petrol and see a station selling it at £1 a litre, and a place down the road has it for 89p per litre, you keep driving. If you want to buy an HDTV, and another country has it for 25% less money, you don't just fly out there and buy it...

 

[Diamond.G]

There is more to it, but it would require you to realise that your sig is worthy of the Inq. We are paid more in europe (the 12 original EU countries at least so don´t get started Ostepop), our salary is higher, we have more buying power (in numbers), but higher salery also means goods are more expensive, the US has "cheap people" (labor) making their buying power weaker. but it also makes it cheaper to sell goods in the US. By your standard every manufactor of goods is trying to fuck the europeans over. The minimum wage in .dk is something like 2100$ a month (37 working hours pr week) how much is the minimum wage in the US ?

Something like 1100 a month. I think the majority of the problem stems from too many damned currencies. The paper money mean nothing nowadays why don't we just change over to credits like they do in online games? Instread we have a multipaged argument over a members sig in respects to what amounts to currency exchange issues.

I would hope we would all be better than that.

 

[TheChefO]

By your standard every manufactor of goods is trying to fuck the europeans over.

As I had already stated previous to this post. Cost of living is not limited to just Europe and US.

Currency exchange, Taxes etc.

The point of the sig is: it's fricking rediculous that a ANY rep said such a thing. And yes, I am insulted. He should know better than to say such a thing, out of context or not. And for an example of contrast, when was the last time you heard another exec say something so stupid in this respect of comparing prices from region to region to explain his products price differences?