Robert Pogson

“Plaintiffs cannot meet their burden with an expert’s general statements about economic theory, and simply throw up their hands when record real-world facts fail to conform to economic theory,” is the quotation from a report filed in the suit against Intel.

This is about Intel paying Dell and other OEMs a “discount” to ignore AMD CPUs. The report to the court likely is about the prices paid. In the absence of sales of AMD CPUs it is hard to demonstrate that consumers/customers paid too much but what of the lack of choice? Combined with Moore’s Law it is hard to prove that Intel’s prices were “too high” or “higher than they would have been” without the discounts. This is silly when you consider the size of the bribes in $billions. If Intel’s prices were not too high, how did Intel imagine they could recoup the payments? Increased volume? Supply and demand do work. If only Intel’s chips are demanded by OEMs then Intel’s prices can be higher. When I look at the price of CPUs I find that Intel charges about $100 more for a chip of comparable performance. When AMD64 came out, AMD did, for a time charge higher prices but that did not last long as the OEMs boycotted AMD. Lack of choice means lack of competition which means higher prices. Also, a customer may prefer AMD but be unable to find them from the usual suppliers with a boycott. The end result of Intel’s discounts would have been the eventual demise of AMD. They had to reorganize, shedding the fabs. If AMD had gone under, Intel could have cleaned up. Do the courts need to see that happen to see that consumers were harmed? AMD was certainly harmed. Don’t they count?