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Aucbvax.1640 fa.apollo utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!DDYER@USC-ISIB Fri Jun 12 00:53:35 1981 personal computer economics

While your fundamental argument is correct, you neglected two important points.

First, the $10K (or whatever) is not free. At today's rates, $10K capital investment costs the company 20% interest, either directly because they had to borrow it, or indirectly, because they don't have it to invest elsewhere. So your increase in productivity would have to be at least 20% to break even.

Second, as someone else has pointed out, no one knows how to quantify the increase (if any) in productivity from something like a star, especially vis a vis similar software running on less flashy hardware. This makes it impossible to "prove" any increase in productivity. -------

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