Once, market forces and the power of brands and reputation provided reassurance. Many businesses took a long-term view and valued their customers’ loyalty. But a more opportunistic outlook on the part of big companies means that, in many markets, reputations have fallen so low that consumers expect nothing and get little. All the petty frauds I have described were perpetrated by well known companies.
In these circumstances, competition is no longer the answer to the problem of tariff complexity but a means of spreading the practice of petty fraud. The company that offers a fair price loses business to the company that provides the misleading tariff.
How “discounts” trick shoppers into buying stuff
These marketing tactics aren’t new. There is a story of two tailors in 1930s Brooklyn, the Drubeck brothers Sid and Harry. When a customer had found a nice suit and asked Sid its price, Sid would shout to his brother at the back of the shop for the price, and Harry would shout back “$44 dollars.” Sid would feign hearing problems and ask again, and Harry would repeat the price. Sid would then report the suit’s price was “$24 dollars,” and the customer would likely grab his “accidental” discount.
If you could in the 1960s buy five cars for the price of one computer and in the 1990s [buy] twenty computers for the price of one car, it is difficult to gauge the relative worth of goods.
Yahoo gives Flickr a new face, a new app, and a new business model | Ars Technica
I love it when companies let you pay to stop showing ads: it gives you a good sense for how much each customer (each pair of "eyeballs") is worth. Here, $50/year.
More: Yahoo gives Flickr a new face, a new app, and a new business model | Ars Technica
QLIK Rising: As DATA Soars, BMO Cheers New Analytics Approach
Watch over the next 2 years as the Big 4 of BI (IBM, Oracle, SAP, and Microstragy) battle distuption from well funded upstarts. Folks like SAS snd Terradata will have to pick sides.
More: QLIK Rising: As DATA Soars, BMO Cheers New Analytics Approach
A peek inside AWS
The engineer says for $7,500 a month, Amazon will guarantee they will be on dedicated hardware, and not just have the IP addresses segmented through the VPC. Noisy neighbors are usually only a problem for larger customers though, he says.
…
He considers Google to be a serious threat to AWS, but not Azure. "Anyone who thinks there is a ‘cloud war’ currently and AWS is seeing any type of real challenge is just fooling themselves. Nobody can compete currently with the size of AWS, they were the first in and will be the last out. Google however will make it rain a bit, I’ve been using their cloud platform a little bit lately and I have to say. It’s … impressive."
Google pools cloud storage
It’s a slow race to capture the white-collar worker segment.
Storage Prices, 2000 to 2001
Extracted from Credit Suisse’s “The Need for Speed” (March 2011) and David Rosenthal’s S3 pricing history. See raw data as well.
I still contend that Apple’s policies and the design of the App Store itself initiated and even accelerated the race to the bottom
