2012-05-29
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Bob Sullivan, in the Red Tape Chronicles: ‘Fair and square’ pricing? That’ll never work, JC Penney. We like being shafted. The story notes that the “massive, creative and aggressive new advertising and pricing campaign that promises simplified prices” “appears to be a disaster. Revenue dropped 20 percent for the first quarter compared to last year. Customer traffic fell 10 percent.” The reason? “If a firm tries to educate consumers on tricks and traps, and tries to offer an honest product, a funny thing happens: Consumers say, “Thank you for the tips,” and go back to the tricky companies, where they exploit the new knowledge to get cheaper prices, leaving the “honest” firm in the dust.”
The point of interest to me (and perhaps the sort of people who read this) is that when I noticed that this was Ron Johnson of Apple, I thought of the way that I’ve never wondered when the best time to buy hardware from them was, or who from. Apple’s pricing is amazingly consistent - there may be 10% off on Black Friday, but probably not on the thing you want, and anyway, it’s not worth waiting for - and that’s true even across stores. (Try finding anyone undercutting the list price on an iPad.)
The product release schedules have also, generally, been well flagged, if you care. The iPhone generally goes on sale in June, and although last year’s 4S was late, pretty much everyone who cared knew it was going to be. iPods are announced in September. Intel’s chip launches are usually followed by refreshed laptop designs (and these days, the advances tend to be incremental enough that missing a release by a month isn’t usually heartbreaking).
Compared to the simplicity and honesty of Apple’s offerings, though, I can imagine the JC Penney product lines, of clothes, shoes, and other household goods, all of which are available from multiple chains and for variable amounts of time, is just so different that Johnson may have to back down from a promise that consumers don’t want him to keep.
2012-04-30
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Bill Nelson, HBO’s chief executive, paraphrased in the Economist’s article from last August: HBO and the future of pay TV.
(Re-reading that article was prompted by a friend asking why I hadn’t streamed Veep to see if I liked it. The answer is that I can’t pay HBO to let me do so.)
2012-02-02
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Fifty years ago, the four most valuable U.S. companies employed an average of 430,000 people with an average market cap of $180 billion. This year, the four largest U.S. companies employ an average 120,000 people with an average market cap of $334 billion. The titans of 2011 have twice the the value of their 1964 counterparts with a quarter of the employees.
(via The Atlantic)
I’m not sure why people think the tech industry is a panacea for job creation. Wealth creation? Perhaps. Jobs? Not so much.
2011-12-29
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2011-11-11
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2010-06-21
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2009-06-08
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A schematic diagram of the Phillips water computer, built in the 1940s to model the British economy, in Like Water for Money, a guest post by Steven Strogatz in the New York Times “The Wild Side” blog. It’s a good read, too. (via)
I’m always happy to see people come across this rather charming, if slightly impractical, analogue computer. I also hadn’t realised there was one in Cambridge (in working order, no less); I know of it from the (non-functional, sadly) example in the Science Museum’s computing gallery.
