At the risk of sounding like I am ranting----
This seems like a great example of someone looking at price and imagining that the cost of hardware is even remotley related to the price of integrating that same hardware into a system.
Cost = how much money you pay to own the device. I bought unit x from company b and had it shipped to "my.plant" and we will integrate it into a "test system" and sell it for a profit (or loss).
So, there were two possibilities on a specific piece of hardware one cost 10,000 beads the other 100 beads and you saved the customer and my.plant 9,900 beads to get the hardware.
The trouble is the 100 bead solution has no "adoption" and you will need to develope a driver for it. Reading the manual (if its any good) is 8 hrs and coding the new driver takes 42 hrs. Testing the code takes another 12-24 hrs (if you don't need to make a test fixture). so at a minumum we are looking at 100 beads plus 62*the base billing rate for a LabVIEW developer at 200 beads per hour your investment is 12500 beads for the 100 bead solution and 10200 beads for the "expensive" hardware.
Next time- the cost effectivness of doing business based on customer support.
-rant off
"Should be" isn't "Is" -Jay
