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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

It makes no sense to me.

What's the advantage of memristor-based storage, exactly?

If it's cheaper to make, then sell storage at a price that undercuts the competition but still makes a better profi.

If it's more reliable, then sell storage at a higher price with a better warranty.

There's no sensible scenario where memristors are ready to go but they don't want to sell any memristor products yet because it will hurt existing sales. Either they can make a better product, or they can't, and if they can't make a better product then the stuff simply isn't ready.

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It's the same price for double the storage, less power and likely more reliability.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/foremski/tha-amazing-memristor-bey...

They are probably delaying to get their profit out of existing investments in tool and die for their factories, as well as high inventories.

While all the manufactures are likely not in cahoots, it's probably like the airline industry where they look to the left and right and nod at each other and change fees right after each other.

Also notable how hard drive prices have not dropped even though supply is completely back to normal.

Storage can be as reliable as you want, you only need to throw parity at the problem. Flash is one of the most unrealiable technology today, chips are ofter rated at only 10000 writes before bit-errors, flash is used as storage today thanks to advanced Error-correction (ECC) algorithms. BTW spinning hard-discs also use ECC since many years ago but it is much less powerful.

The advantages of memristor technology are many. In ordinary conventional non-volatile storage it offers densities higher than flash and speeds approaching SDRAM. I'll let you work out the implications of that on your own.

> I'll let you worj out the implications of that on your own.

If those are reasy HP and partners can sell them at a premium.

That doesn't necessarily help. For any technology there will be a price vs. expected sales volume curve and thus a sweet spot that maximizes revenue. It's possible that people have looked at enough numbers and figured out that the interaction between the demand curves for memristors and for flash is such that they can more easily maximize revenue by delaying memristors.

For example, pricing memristor based drives exceedingly high will still likely put them well within the price range of ultra high-end flash based enterprise level drives (such as card based multi-terabyte SLC based drives), and so will still result in a canibalization of flash sales.

what if they have a bunch of flash products already made? They need to get rid of that product first before they make it worth less.

They're talking about delaying commercialization from a year out to sometime farther. There's no way they have a year's worth of flash products sitting in inventory.

It's not only products siting in inventory. It's also:

1) products sitting in store fronts and retail, that will be unsold if they announce something new.

2) Investments (in the billions) they have made for flash production. You don't just kill all the money you have invested to build a flash plant because there's a new better technology. Not if you can delay the introduction of said technology until those costs are absorbed, and the investments have paid for themselves.

3) materials they have ordered for flash production. Volume deals to manufactures for metals and the like can run not just one year ahead but several.

Selling the old stuff for a while is not even about price-fixing, if you think at this level, it's something natural that benefits all companies involved.

They all have: factory stock, retail stock, investments in flash technology and volume orders on materials to absorb before making the jump.

This all strikes me as an example of a sunk-cost fallacy. Either memristors will make more money, or they won't. If they will, it doesn't matter that you have a billion dollars invested in X that won't be useful anymore, because you've already spent that money. If memristors won't make more money than making flash products using existing infrastructure, then it's not ready for commercial use and there's no conspiracy behind the delay.

This is very clearly not the sunk cost fallacy. In this case, they are delaying making money (thanks to collusion + patents most likely) and they are still going to recoup their currently 'sunk' costs.

The sunk cost fallacy is continuing to put money into something explicitly because you're counting the previously sunk costs instead of justifying it by "the remainder to be spent < the expected return value." In this case, that's not the calculation that's being made at all.

Anyway, still enjoyed your comment :)

>This all strikes me as an example of a sunk-cost fallacy. Either memristors will make more money, or they won't. If they will, it doesn't matter that you have a billion dollars invested in X that won't be useful anymore, because you've already spent that money.

That's nothing like the "sunk cost fallacy". For one, in the sunk cost fallacy you cannot get your "sunk costs" back.

But those companies CAN (and will), sell their old flash tech stock.

>There's no sensible scenario where memristors are ready to go but they don't want to sell any memristor products yet because it will hurt existing sales.

It's not about existing sales, it's about stock. If you have built a lot of stock of traditional devices (including materials and infrastructure for manufacture) while waiting for memsistor tech to be ready for prime time, you want to sell it first before you put out the new products in the market.

But surely, competitors will jump right in, right? Unfortunately, there are that many players. Similarly, they can't "undercut the competition" because there is no competition, just a few players that "understand" each other.

Storage/memory manufacturers have had a few price-fixing scandals over the years.

> It's not about existing sales, it's about stock.

They keep a year of sales in inventory? That's a lot of money to have tied up.

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