The first question was pretty basic: How do we figure out how much to charge for our machine? I was told by the presidents of Sun and Silicon Graphics to start with a high number. If you start high, they said, you can always reduce the price; if you lowball it and then need to raise the price later, you will only upset your customers. So based on the profit margins we wanted, we decided on a price of $122,000 per unit. Big mistake. The Pixar Image Computer quickly gained a reputation for being powerful but too expensive. When we lowered the price later, we discovered that our reputation for
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