On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 5:11 AM, Joe Landman <land...@scalableinformatics.com> wrote: > At the end of the day, the fundamental question we are debating is, does > the "prestige" of working with a top university/national lab have any > real tangible value that you can ascribe to the bottom line, does it > actually impact sales. > > I posit that the answer to this is a resounding "no". You obviously > disagree.
I also disagree, but I have another point of view: the fact of working with a top university/national lab can be important for the development of the product or line of products. A top university/national lab is considered top because it has clever people who are renowned for their way of thinking and/or published results; given a new (type of) parallel machine, they might come up with amazing results and/or might allow them to become even more famous - their publications will mention the (type of) parallel machine on which their results were obtained and other people looking to obtain similar results or looking for even better results (=competitors :-)) will become interested. This doesn't necessarily mean that they will buy the same (type of) parallel machines now but, if the results were amazing enough, the _next_ generation of parallel machines from this or other vendor will be able to achieve the same amazing results because, by then, buyers will ask for it. So it effectively becomes an investment in the future. Bogdan _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
