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Aucbvax.1641 fa.apollo utzoo!duke!mhtsa!ucbvax!LLOYD@MIT-AI Fri Jun 12 04:48:11 1981 Subjective value of Personal Workstations

Regardless of the arguments for and against the economic value of the Personal Workstation (PW), the numbers are beginning to tell. I work for Alanthus Data Communications and we market the Convergent Technologies system to end users. Our marketing strategy is to point out how the system provides OA, communications, and user programmability in one box.

The response is overwhelming! The average configuration seems to be going out at about $20,000 including software. Granted, at this point in time people are buying development systems, but the availablity of OA software (WP, mail, etc.) has been a driving point in almost every sale.

Obviously people believe in the PW concept and the market is still growing. Since people rarely exhibit rational behavior (except in a negative [fiscal] sense), I don't expect rational decisions either way on the subject. We all realize that OA and PWs are coming and noone is going to stop it.

Since we all tend to be in areas of development for OA products, let us now discuss what the needs of the user really are. Perhaps we can decide what Office Automation and Personal Workstation really means.

Brian

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