“if your model is to license at a rate less than the value you believe you are giving the customer, how can that possibly be in a non-sustainable or a bad business.”

I’ve expressed my opinion here before that I support Mr. Hughes’ efforts to broaden the IP base for Rambus, and I know how easy it is to sometimes miss the mark when answering questions on the fly. But I do have to take some exception to his above remark.

Any sales person can tell you it really doesn’t matter what “value” his management places on a product. The only value that is meaningful to a potential customer is the one that particular potential customer places on the product relative to the value that potential customer can get from other sources. The entire concept of free-market is to weed out over-engineered products or inefficient processes. Valuing Rambus’ DRAM interfaces based purely on the company’s own internal opinion and disregarding the competitive cost to the OEM base of using a Jedec interface based on open IP would certainly lead Rambus to a false sense of true “market value.” I really doubt that this is what Mr. Hughes meant to imply. However since the core issue between Rambus and the memory manufacturers is the “market value” of Rambus’ proprietary interfaces, I thought I’d offer my opinion on this topic.