The Future of Subnotebook Pricing 145
Corpuscavernosa recommends a story from InternetNews about the development of the subnotebook market. The author notes the beginnings of a trend toward selling the devices bundled with certain services rather than as standalone products. He notes two examples; a free Asus Eee PC with a broadband package, and another for opening a bank account. Quoting:
"Soon, the market will be overwhelmed by what I like to call 'mini me too' laptops -- commodity Asus clones that will drive margins for all players toward zero. There will be no real money to be made in direct sales of cheap mini-notebooks to consumers. I'm predicting that the successful pricing model for 'mini me too' laptops will look nothing like the notebook pricing model (where you always pay full price for the hardware), and a lot like the cell phone pricing model where you buy a service, and the hardware is heavily subsidized or given away free."
like cell phones... (Score:1, Interesting)
Calculator Redux? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Subnotebooks like Cell phone plans? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why there are no economist billionaires. (Score:2, Interesting)
This is why I wanted to slap my econ teacher in B-school around.
There are no billionaire economists - but they know it all, don't they? And yet, an uneducated man from Arkansas became one on the richest men in the World from making zero economic profit: Sam Walton founder of Walmart.
Yo! Asus! Listen up! (Score:3, Interesting)
Part of it is due to a clueless webdesigner, who loaded it up with flash, javascript and all sorts of other crap. Add to that a big rise in people visiting, and suddenly their servers are dog slow (at best) and down (too often).
In fact, it's a classic example of what not to do with web design and IT planning.
So, Asus, could you PLEASE put some bright people on this, and give them the resources they need?
At to the bright people: could you PLEASE not make having Javascript and Flash mandatory? Not all of us are smoking the Web 2.0 crack.
Thanks.
Repeat (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why there are no economist billionaires. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:I'm not sure the author understands economics (Score:1, Interesting)
BTW vendors that have established strong brand names, including HP, Sony, Lenovo, Dell, and Gateway, have a strong point of differentiation from the "no-name" vendors and so are arguably not playing in a commodity market. The brand-name vendors are in a "several vendors" market, which should allow at least some of them to make profits above the money market rate of return, assuming they are well-managed.
Re:AMD geode (Score:1, Interesting)
Me thinks you're talking about some machine with a Geode *in it* (maybe powersupply burnout), or perhaps a laptop battery catching fire?