On the Win box side everyone jumped on the lowest price band wagon, and the quality showed it. Apple gets away with much higher margins because they never played that game. They never turned their box into a commodity, although that may change now.
I saw that, Jams. A bit twisted, but not all that far off. The media moguls think they will make money with this, but they are just pissing off their customer base.
When movie tickets are as, and in some cases more, expensive than the DVD, why would you go to the movie. The best alternative is to rent the DVD. They have priced themselves into this mess.
]]>On a lighter note is this the future of anti piracy adverts?
http://thepoormouth.blogspot.com/2012/01/piracy-waning-for-sopa-age.html
]]>Oh sure, I know that people *say* they want to buy stuff made in America, but the proof is in whether they’re willing to put their money where their mouth is. There’s an underwear company that had a factory in a small town in Louisiana. Their packages displayed a proud “Made in America” label at Sears and Wal-Mart and everywhere else underwear sold, but didn’t sell anywhere near as well as the 50-cents-cheaper package of underwear made in Vietnam while not making as much profit as the competitor’s underwear made in Vietnam. So they finally shut down their factory in Louisiana and moved production to Thailand. What were they supposed to do, given that the consumers voted with their dollars to support Vietnam, rather than America?
Businesses are just giving Americans what they apparently want. If consumers don’t seem to care about supporting America, why *should* business care?
– Badtux the Contrarian Penguin
]]>They just don’t understand that some kid downloading a lousy copy of a recent movie isn’t their problem – it’s people buying the movies through legitimate outlets that were made at the same factory, from the same master, but they aren’t getting paid for them.
When you lose control of your product, you have nothing to sell, because factories in other countries couldn’t care less about your ‘intellectual property rights’, only about their profit margin. Hell, they run one shift for the products you get to sell, and two shifts to make the product you get nothing from.
When you out-source customer service, you have lost your best connection to your customer base.
The current crop of CEOs are morons. They don’t understand what they lose when they out-source, they don’t understand the real ‘costs’ of doing it.
There were floods in Thailand, so you can’t get hard drives. The current ‘capitalist’ system has adopted the worst features of the old Soviet system, including single-sourcing individual components.
]]>If only China manufactures DVDs (legal or otherwise), only the Chinese will be able to afford DVDs. Despite the loudest protests from our most conservative business “leaders,” there is no such thing as a free lunch, and that’s what they are looking for when they outsource and offshore technology-related work of any sort, including manufacturing. Yes, damn them, I do blame them.
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