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Use of Student Plants to Pitch Products Rising
theodp wrote to mention a Seattle PI article about software and niche companies using college-age hucksters to get the word about their product out. From the article: "Microsoft is among a growing number of companies seeking to reach the elusive but critical college market by hiring students to be ambassadors -- or, in more traditional terms, door-to-door salesmen. In an age when the college demographic is no longer easily reached by television, radio or newspapers -- as TiVo, satellite radio, iPods and the Internet crowd out the traditional advertising venues -- a microindustry of campus marketing has emerged. Niche firms have sprung up to act as recruiters of students, who then market products on campus for companies such as Microsoft, JetBlue Airways, The Cartoon Network and Victoria's Secret."
Please confine all "clever" jokes about female college students promoting Victoria's Secret products to this thread and this thread only. Thank you.
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
Make your stuff cheaper. In all the colleges/universities. This idea is more for Microsoft, since I don't want Cartoon Network to make their shows cheaper.
I've tried marketing voting at a University, and people weren't interested. The problem was I wasn't handing out ballots with a pen, and a ballot box down the hallway. Kids will take what is pushed into their hand, especially if the pusher is attractive, and they don't stand to lose money immediately on the free product. I may not be attractive enough to market democracy, but isn't it a shame that Coke and Microsoft have that kind of appeal, but the fricken government that can take your money WITHOUT tricking you with marketing, holds no interest with the slobbering masses.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Apple's been doing this for years. 3 Large campus' in this Metro area all have CR's that work to promote Apple on campus. It's all about the viral marketing baby.
... the Victoria's Secret door-to-door saleswomen, that is!
Infuriate left and right
It's happening already. Check out this forum on a Purdue student messageboard. This idiot is plugging some sort of notetaking software.
What reminded me was that in the book, they have people who go up and pitch things directly to other people, and they have watches that listen for audio cues, and when they've successfully pitched someone, money is deposited into an account for them.
And while I should know this since I'm in advertising.....how do these companies make sure these kids are actually pitching? How do they know they're not just paying them to go dick around with their friends and not do anything? There's no real sort of metrics for this sort of thing nor is there much control.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
If they have to market it on commercials, its probably not worth what you have to pay for it.
... and then there is that other venerable vocation where most participants are 'working their way through college' (wink wink)
I would think that "word of mouth" advertising would work quite a bit better if your product was worth paying for? Perhaps I'm just cynical, but I am thinking that this is no better than commercials, but you can't switch the channel...this is more "in your face"
Arrggg I'm having memories of people selling household cleaning stuff door to door while "working their way through college"
Seriously, how does this help companies that already have GLOBAL brand name recognition?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
A guy goes into a small business convention and gets roped in by some huckster trying to get him into a Multilevel Marketing company. After sitting through his lecture about how great the opportunity is, how it's can't miss, how he can just get everyone around him to buy the company's crap at outrageous prices, and there isn't much investment, the guy gets asked "Come on! What have you got to lose?"
His answer: "All my friends".
"Push marketing" types, also known as salesmen, keep trying to push crap products onto people. But generally, good products sell themselves.
I'm not sure how new this is. I remember students hired to set up tables at my university to push credit card applications onto other students coming out of classes---some of the people most likely to mess up their credit thanks to being independent for the first time and not knowing how to manage money.
At least the marketers never invaded the classroom itself; although Coca Cola has already invaded our cafeterias.
At least they're honest about selling you a product. They're not pretending they're your friend or that this is a personal cause. For the brief period of my life that I did door-to-door sales I never lied to get a sale. I didn't try to convince people that I was there to do anything less than sell them a product, service, or promotion, usually at a very competitive price. As such, I never had a door slammed on my face, or was treated disrespectfully. Thankfully I've never done telesales.. it's just way too impersonal and agressive.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Here at the University of Florida I've seen the Microsoft ones. They're heavily promoting OneNote, figuring college students probably would have use of note-taking software. Except that most people don't go to class, ergo they don't take notes, and those that do generally buy the note packets from local copy stores (professors put all of their slides or outlines of all of the lectures together and the stores print and bind them). There's no need for OneNote when you have the slides on paper.
They also wrote a URL for how to download a free trial in sidewalk chalk all over campus, which is technically regarded as graffiti and as such is against campus rules. Fortunately a combination of UPD and the outer bands of Tropical Storm Tammy took care of that. I haven't seen them since.
"I dream of a future where marketing has no bounds....Billboards, TV and radio commericals, fliers, even people!"
-Satan
As Slick opens his coat and shows you 50 shining new CDs of MS office and shows you his crackz sheet and keygens.
To have students push beer or Jack Daniels or one of my other favorite adult beverages.
I wonder if Victoria's Secret is going after the tranny market?
I know at my Uni (Cornell) they pay kids good money to go sit out on the quad playing Xbox and PS2 to promote the latest games. It is something like 500 bucks for a day of playing video games, so all the undergrad business kids to compete to get the job. Talk about corporate whoring...
This is called Astroturf. (movements that look their grassroots, but in reality are sponsored by a company).
It's called a street team. Bands have been doing it for years. Nothing really all that new.
College students will smart up to this, too. They forget the whole reason we moved away from print, regular TV, and radio. At least for me, I did it TO GET AWAY from the advertisements that those mediums were just overloaded with. If I didn't buy in back then, why would I buy in now?
""Push marketing" types, also known as salesmen, keep trying to push crap products onto people. But generally, good products sell themselves."
I swear this crowd acts like they have never been in the real world.* Anyway if "good products" sells themselves? Then:
1) There never would have been a need for advertising (history shows otherwise even in ancient times).
2) Betamax would have won instead of VHS.
*Up next consultants are satan and all salesman sell crap. Geeks all live in their basements, and are anti-social trolls.
My roommate is a perfect example of this. He is obsessed with poker, and I get the feeling it's not out of love for the game. He buys stuff and resells it on eBay---which is OK on its own, but sometimes he'll auction off things he doesn't have, then order them from Amazon, and make it so that they ship straight to the auction winner.
I have no doubt he would shill for money. The guy has nary a moral fiber in his body, at least when it comes to money.
of course, after a student had sold insurance to
their friends & relatives, they couldn't meet
their sales quotas... and got replaced by the
"next generation" of student salespeople.
History repeats itself...
to stay the hell away from their local Computing Science club. I know what will happen if one of these guys tried this stuff at my CS student society. They'd end up arguing until they wish they died!
Title 15, chapter 2, sec 13a of the US Code (Part of the The Clayton Antitrust Act) says it's illegal to:
to sell, or contract to sell, goods at unreasonably low prices for the purpose of destroying competition or eliminating a competitor.
"It is something like 500 bucks for a day of playing video games, so all the undergrad business kids to compete to get the job. Talk about corporate whoring..."
Funny how getting money to play games is considered "whoring". But when you all get together at a LAN competition playing various games and winning prizes and money, sponsered by AMD or Nvidia, it's considered a sport.
In a similar vein, I would like to institute a sub-thread for the "In my day, 'student plants' meant something totally different" jokes.
Thanks.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
That's called good business sense. If people are willing to pay more on ebay for something than it costs on Amazon, they deserve to be taken advantage of. "The guy has nary a moral fiber in his body" is pure bs - he's just better than you at the game we call capitalism.
I have seen Apple use a lot of college plants here at Northern Illinois where I go to school.
Not only that, but I have, myself, been approached by Apple. Last year I ran a film festival for amateur film makers, they approached me about running it again, and changing it to use only Apple products and the iMovie format.
I have heard from a couple of dissatisfied members of the Mac support group here on campus that it has become little more than a sales convention every other week when it meets.
That same group had an event on campus called "Who is your Mac Daddy", which was basically just a tupperware party for Apple products.
It's sick...
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Gambling in order to win, and selling things at a profit... he might be immoral, but I hardly consider either behavior evidence for it.
Microsoft does make signifigant student discounts, though they certain could make more, Office is still quite expensive for those of us who are broke.
I'd love to see *ADOBE* really cut their prices for students... God forbid an graphic design student actually want to buy a copy of Photoshop...
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
a license to shill
(check this if you don't know what I am talking about)
The (ugly) radical feminists would have run them off campus.
My rights don't need management.
I talked to one of those guys who go to bars and liquor stores... they basically get a hundred or two a night to just go out to bars and give away free stuff.
... heck, I got some free Stoli that way ;)
I've never seen them outside of those two venues... so I think it's pretty PC, the folks who are already inclined to drink just get free stuff (shirts, samples, buttons)
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
They get all the perks, free powerbooks, nanos, mighty-mice, etc. Also, they get a freakin sweet laptop bag with integrated speakers.
She was a Microsoft Rep at her school. Basically did promotions for MS- like raffle off free software/games.
After she graduated, she tried the MS interview but didn't make the cut.
Anyway, she had some leftover software and gave me a copy of Visual Studio. Nice but sadly, I'm an environemntal sci major.
Grump
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
"Yes, I know that voting is the method to change those two things, but a lot of people see it as an 8000lbs gorilla that can and will do whatever the heck it wants."
And therein lies the problem. People aren't educating themselves enough about the process our founders set up, and thereby have this narrow view that there's only one way, one obligation.
Voting isn't the only way, and it was never ment to be.
No that doesn't seem like good capitalism at all. It seems like fraud. If somebody is advertising a product on E-Bay that they do not actually own yet and they do not disclose that information, that is not a good thing. Without a basic level of trust between buyers and sellers there is no economy. Said person needs that "moral fiber" or he's going to end up the slimy kind of salesman that nobody wants to talk to at a used car dealership. It's hardly anything to be admired.
Everyone wins.
Student Salesman: Gets money
College Students: learn more about products, get discouts thanks to their friends being reps.
Companies: More sales.
My high school had this around prom time... 10% off your tux rental for each refereal... refer 10 and its free.
Now you might say that I am biased against Microsoft (where you would get this idea I don't know), but hey, consider that I have had to put up with wormy networks and teach people how to configure 14 different versions of Outlook for years. "Daaahhh.. I can't print! ...". When I made my switch (mid 90's, thanks) I had to learn a little more (how inconvenient), but at least I have a lot of free time and cash now. You have to really admire an Operating System which you can set up and forget about for months if not years at a time. I know, very inconvenient.
The idea of sending out armies of college students to market their product is of course what one can expect from such an unscrupulous company. I wouldn't be suprised if Microsoft made these people tattoo the butterfly on their asses as a marketing ploy. At least the butterfly would get maximum exposure given the type of people who it would sport it... I know this one guy who uses his free time to write code to send to Microsoft as if anyone there likes him or even knows him. "Camel Balls" we call him, he walks around shoving his nuts out wearing pants that are too tight, ranting about how my firewall is pushing traffic out the wrong interface because someone told him how to use 'iptraf' and now he is a UNIX Expert. What a douche bag. Like alot of MCSEs he tries to tell me things about Linux and computers in general that have no basis in reality whatsoever. Incidentally he was incorrect about the firewall - he had no idea what he was looking at anyway.
The point is, whoever comes up to me better have a nice rack or I'll ruin their day. I'm just being honest. I don't like greedy companies and I can't stand people who support them for free. WTF is that??? Just give up your free time to work for Microsoft so they can make more money off of your dumb, broke ass. Give ME a break! At least OSS is given to the WORLD, not directly to some prick's pocketbook.
Warning: Do not mod me down or I will find you and hide a Windows ME box in the false ceiling on your network!
You are about to give someone a piece of your mind, something which you can ill afford...
Doesn't matter where you get it or if you have it as long as you deliver what you say you are going to deliver. Many, many things are sold before they exist, hardly fraud.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
Just today I was reading a copy of a New York Times Magazine article that had a pretty similar theme. There is a company out there (I'll call it "Bzz", because I don't remember the name but Bzz is pretty close) that works with unpaid volunteer "agents" to promote its customers' brands. People sign up, get product samples, then they're given talking points and told to go out and generate buzz for the product. The agents talk to their friends, fill out suggestion cards, call supermarkets/bookstores/etc. to ask whether they carry the product.
The reporters were surprised at how enthusiastic people were about doing unpaid work on behalf of these companies. Though Bzz offered a reward program, not many people cash in on it. The reporters came up with quite a few (mostly complementary) explanations. First, Bzz claimed that it only marketed 20% of the products that came to them, leaving the impression that their agents were only being asked to pimp the really good stuff. Then you have that eternal desire to be "in the know", to suggest a product or a restaurant to your friends and having the suggestion stick (see Linux advocacy). Finally, it seems that if you ask people to choose among basically equivalent items, when one of those items is somehow "theirs", they tend to value that item more highly. So just by giving agents a sample of the product, the marketing company can create a positive impression.
Officially, Bzz doesn't require its unpaid agents to spin the product in a positive light. All they ask is that people talk about the product. This helps sell people on the idea of being advertisers, since they're just being asked to talk about their opinions, rather than slavishly following the party line.
I think this is a small step up from some forms of astroturfing (for example, hiring beautiful women to go to bars and order Drink X), but not a big one. The worst part about these techniques is that they constitute an abuse of trust. Such activities allow a big corporation to sneak their "message" into what people assume to be a candid exchange of information. Whether the messengers are being paid in dollars, "points", sexual favors, or pats on the back isn't terribly relevant to me. The issue is that one party to the conversation has a hidden agenda that the other party isn't going to be on the lookout for.
Look at it this way: the marketers advertised so incessantly at us that we mostly tuned them out. We turned instead to the people around us for information. Now the evil bastards want to exploit the one remaining source of "unbiased" information. I mean, sure we're all biased, but the point is, we're plugging for our own biases, not those of the product manufacturer. They've finally found ways to exploit our trust in each other for personal profit, and they give fuck all if they're damaging that trust as they do so. Fight this.
The activities in the article are shameless in their own ways, but at least the targets have a better chance of discerning that the people plugging the product are paid product pluggers.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
What's wrong with shilling for money? It's a great skill to learn. Eventually you'll get out of college, and you will have to start shilling something. Even if it's just shilling yourself to an employer during an interview, it's still shilling.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The idea of a good product sells itself. I work in retail when I'm not at college, and the difference between the product I sell and my competitors' products is rarely large enough to matter-- yes, ours may be higher quality fabrics, but theirs are cheaper, and what have you. Basically though, we sell the same clothes. What it comes down to is the employee's ability to get people -into- the clothes they want to wear. Campus marketing to raise awareness seems completely legitimate, from my experience.
I read somewhere, but I can't find it on the 'Net, that Tommy Hilfiger would pay gangstas to be seen around South Central LA wearing Tommy's clothes. Has anyone else heard about this?
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
The examples presented typically are irrelevant because they don't have a large need for representation to college students. Microsoft... already represented on most campuses with official OS support, and CS departments tend to buy into their MSDN volume licensing. JetBlue Airways... some college students may fly, but most universities cater mostly to local students with in-state tuition. The Cartoon Network... the post suggests that TV is out and other things are in. Maybe they should instead push cable and satellite companies to cater to the college group more? Victoria's Secret... college students find this store easily enough on their own.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Engage in some morally-positive work like prostitution or drug-dealing or something. Just don't hawk wares for companies to your 'friends'.
Man, if I were given a shot at being an ambassador for Victoria's Secret, I'd take it! :P
I mean, come on! What college-aged male wouldn't?
Er... Ahem... Go White Sox?
Please stop lying. You have made it abundantly clear from your posts at kuro5hin.org that you dropped out of college some time ago.
I think it's pretty silly that Microsoft has to resort to offbeat tactics to win more supporters. After all, if they had any quality products to offer, they would be popular without feeling the need to brainwash the next generation of leaders in the computer and buisness world, right? /. community, I think it's safe to presume you're cheering.
Since this is the
Oh wait, replace "Microsoft" with "Google", and that's what I meant to post...
http://www.google.com/jobs/studentsg.html
(Not exactly the same, I know...but in college, free pizza wins loyalty)
On a related note, I go to BU, and this past week, while crossing the street, I noticed a Microsoft OneNote ad chalked with a stencil on the pavement between the T tracks (the T is what Bostonians call their subway, i.e. train or tram).
From the article: "Many [student representatives] are specially trained, sometimes at corporate headquarters, Gossett said, as in the case with Microsoft."
The T runs above-ground through BU, but the first stop after the campus is underground. So if you are crossing the street and see this chalked advertisement (which is quite blurry and in fact barely legible, because, hey, it rains a lot in Boston and chalk runs), your natural response is to stop walking for a moment so that you can look down and and actually make out what it says. Specifically, you need to stop on the T tracks...50 feet from where the T goes above-ground. Perfect conditions for getting run over with a 20 ton subway car.
That's some nice training, there, Microsoft.
sometimes he'll auction off things he doesn't have, then order them from Amazon, and make it so that they ship straight to the auction winner.
That's called "Drop shipping", and there's nothing wrong with that. As long as he delivers what he sells, he's on the up-and-up. He has no duty to inform his customers that they could find a better price elsewhere.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Wohoo!
I have waited for this day! Finally I can give immediate feedback to the spammer who aproaches me. Most likely in fork-in-the-eye-fashion.
RL spammers beware: I'm one of them.
Bot Assisted Blogging
they're usin' greenery to sell this crap on campus nowadays? sounds damn healthy to me. i'd buy stuff from some co-ed who wanted to give me a flowering plant.
A kid I went to high school with became the Playboy representative at his school. Basicly they pay him to throw massive parties and give out copies of playboy... sick deal.
No smoking sigs indoors.
I believe the best advertising is still genuine word of mouth amoung your friends and associates - not paid schills who want to read you a bulleted list.
This goes for movies, games, hardware, and software.
The easiest way to get it is to stick your money/time not in marketing but into research/engineering/whatnot into making a great product.
The Apple iPod is a great example of this - I heard of it from my friends as recommendations long before I've seen it advertised by the company.
With this in mind, the problem is reduced to getting the attention of those hardcore 5% who will get excited over it and evangelizse it. This can be done by targetted advertised like trade publications, going to conventions and offering discounts on said product, etcetera.
Of course this is assuming the product is excellent. If it's mediocre or lower, the advertising won't take care of itself and it'll have to be given a bigger shove out the door.
My worry over this shill advertising is that it has reached, not just campuses, but online reviewers/posters (like say slashdot or Tom's hardware) under the guise of a disgenuine recommendation. In real life, I can tell when a guy is playing the salesman, but not always so in a "review" or post. The good thing is the internet is so vast and broad, I can get a 500th opinion on things.
The above posts demonstrate exactly why capitalism has been called "irresponsibility developed into a system". Just because you can rip someone off doesn't mean it's right or even OK to do so.
"Are you stupid" ... not a good way to start, old bean.
===
I'll explain my position a bit, so you can see where I am coming from.
So, let's assume gas was $100 a gallon.
Then someone made a discount to take it down to $25...
Yes, the MARGIN of decrease looks good, but the original value (and as such, the discounted value) is still excessively inflated.
===
IMHO, if people are saying that Microsoft charges an arm and a leg, they are missing that companies like Adobe are charging all limbs and a head.
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Seriously, our ECE honors organization has a lounge in the basement of the EE building that sells food and drinks and turns a good profit. We figure that EEs and CompEs aren't very social by nature, so every couple of weeks, we go out to a local resturant, bar, etc. and give everybody who shows up $3 to subsidize their food. The idea is to get people out of the lab and have a good time. Our student organization finance office requires that we get signatures of everybody who shows up to guarantee that we aren't just pocketing the cash. We don't take any personal information, and you don't even have to sign the form legibly. A large number of people won't sign the form to get the free money because they keep waiting for the other foot to drop.
Jokes about EEs being so uncool that you have to pay people to hang out with them aside...
You'll never get students to actually do something later, even if you give them all sorts of free stuff, unless they were going to do it, anyway. Once they get the free stuff, you have no further bargaining capacity, and they have no further incentive to oblige you.
There are two types of people: those prepared for the zombie apocalypse and those who will be eaten.
So how many of the people posting on Slashdot are CRs and what companies do they represent?
It's too big a forum for marketers to ignore completely, so there'd have to be a few either monitoring or contributing. Any brave enough to come out of the closet and tell us about it?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
hah .. someone (no longer) on my msn friends list tried to get me to join the army - but he didn't realise i was only 14 (lied about my age). turns out hes a soldier too ! when he cam'd with me. this is in the uk, btw !
I know a couple of guys that would make a pretty coin every graduation season selling graduation supplies (robes, diplomas, folders, whatever). Their business was very simple website on Yahoo! Stores and contacts with wholesalers. They would work out of their shared apartment, spend the day sitting at their computers, getting faxes/emails, retyping them and sending them off to the wholesaler to ship direct to the clients.
My definition of a good deal is one where everybody is happy. The client is happy getting a lower price than he would through a larger graduation supply company, my friends are happy because they're getting paid.
Almost two years ago, I did this for Idea (now Orange) - one of Poland's 3 cellular services providers. While working for the Red Cell network, we ran this program in 8 cities on 8 campuses, with some 300-400 ambassadors working for us at once.
The ambassadors would make a couple of bucks (I can't remember how much, I'm thinking 20PLN) for each contract they got and were able to give their clients deals they wouldn't get at the salon. There were clearly a couple of stars, people who would get 30-50 contracts/month, while a lot of them worked just enough to pay for their own cell phone usage.
At the end of the program, a lot of the stars were offered steady work - why would we want to get rid of a good salesperson?
If I am ever driven to murder in pure rage, it's a 50% chance that it will be a door-to-door salesman. No matter WHAT they're selling.
I understood all of the words but the sentence took a little time.
AT&ROFLMAO
In an age when the college demographic is no longer easily reached by television, radio or newspapers -- as TiVo, satellite radio, iPods and the Internet crowd out the traditional advertising venues -- a microindustry of campus marketing has emerged.
And after college you can look forward to product or services placement in online news articles!
CS and IT students at my school have access to the MSDN academic allience, which enables us to get copies of MS software like Windows XP and Visual Studio for free.
Telling your friends that you think your iPod is great because Apple paid you to is shilling. Why is it a problem? It's fundamentally dishonest.
I once saw an episode of the TV show The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis which was made before I was even born, in which Dobie walks around campus wearing a brand-new suit made by a local tailor, and agrees to tell guys where he got it from (not mentioning he got it for free). So this practice was popular enough for it to be the plotline of an episode of a show that is over 50 years old, but apparently nobody has considered that the practice might still continue to be used.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
To me, it's just free market economics.
Vector Marketing, which sells Cutco knives, has been recruiting college students for years. They sell knives by having people do in-home demonstrations, but who wants to let a salesperson in their house? What if instead of letting a salesperson in you were helping out your friend/neighbor's college student put themselves through school? Also they claim you "get paid no matter what" so that you can try to convince them when setting up the appointment that you're not a salesperson. Its a pretty evil system and seems to work well. Since nobody would actually want to sell knives in people's houses, they use very tricky wording to get the students in there. Check out this site which is their student recruitment site. From reading the site, what do you think the job is? This use of college students isn't a new trick by any means, but it seems to be an effective one.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
I've been wasting my time converting my friends to Mozilla Firefox, when I could have been pitching commercial products and services to them for ca$h mon€¥!
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
Part Two of the program is a $500,0000 per year site license, as noted here, which brings the Microsoft Tax to everyone on campus. This is a program that eats up 1/8 of the $150/year student tech fee for the ability to download the most basic of software, productivity software, email client and this goofey one note. Someone on the thread does the math and estimates Microsoft will pocket about $300 per software set they distribute, which is well above the usual Dell rip-off. Of course, it is much much more than a download of Mepis, which has more and better applications.
In typical Microsoft style, they are touting the rip-off as "free software". They spammed every student on campus with an email that mentioned a commitment but no costs and had the nerve to stand in the middle of free speech alley and proclaim "free" downloads. What a turn off.
Surprisingly, it has not worked very well. People are outraged when they learn the cost. Few people want to risk their only working computer to "upgrade" software they already own, as free software advocates can tell you. Most people walked by the barkers at free speech alley and could care less. Did they really think people care about Outlook? I was one of the few people who bothered to talk to them and I agree with the BRLUG poster above, the reps were poorly trained and did not know their product. Spam backfires. Most people are going to look at the Microsoft dream play, where a fellow student tries to hawk a program, as weird and disturbing.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Einstein did not mean to imply, however, that knowledge is unimportant.
I don't think the poster meant to imply this either, however, people often use this quote to justify their own personal LACK of knowledge, and their failure to care about obtaining any of it.
Not that it really matters anyway. Being smart doesn't automatically make your opinions correct...even if you are Einstein.
http://www.americanapparel.net/
the linux rise originated from 2 things, the internet and colleges (nobody ever mentions the 'colleges', but i'm convinced it is).
i was converted to linux during the year 1997, when a fellow student was telling about it, and i remember talking about it with my friends at college and then even installing it a week later 'just to check out', the rest is history... it didn't only happen to me that way, but a lot of other students had been trying it out as well.
probably these companies are noticing this too, a lot of people who are starting to look for jobs will know OSS and promote it as well. how will they ever know those other companies products, when they never heard about them before (i'm not talking MS here, but others like CA, HP, BMC, etc... which are expensive and you wont find them easily in colleges). and when they are introduced to them they'll say - yeah, but, i can already do that with well-known-oss-project a lot cheaper+more flexibel, so take your crap somewhere else please...
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
That's sad. I've never liked the idea of using friendship to sell anything. It puts a strain on friendships and often says something less that flattering about the one selling this way. Some get very touchy when you don't find their pitch very impressive.
And it's easy to suspect that some of these salesman aren't even revealing that they're getting paid--the campus equivalent of "Astroturfing" when there is no genuine grassroots movement.
--Mike Perry, Seattle
Microsoft's software (and other software, like Matlab) is already too cheap for college students; students invest a boatload of time into learning the software, and when they graduate, they are faced with either spending another several years re-learning something else, or spending thousands of dollars for software every year. It's a colossal rip-off.
If companies want to offer "educational versions", they should be allowed to do so, but they should not be permitted to legally enforce the educational-only restrictions.
I think you are slightly misinterpretating that section of the US Code.
Disclaimer: IANAL, but I am a law student.
Recollecting from my undergrad anti-trust course, that section is there to avoid "predatory pricing." The concept of predatory pricing is that you are 1) selling items below cost 2) for the purpose of destroying competition 3) so you can raise prices later and recoup your losses (and then some).
That's not what's happening here. Here the grandparent poster is (perhaps) advocating price discrimination, which is selling at different prices to different groups, with all of those prices being above cost. (This is advantageous over a single profit-maximizing price, as you are losing sales from consumers who value the good above cost but below the single price.) University students would be one of those "different groups" that would receive lower prices.
Price discrimination is usually hard to pull off, because there is consumer backlash if individuals know that different prices are being charged. So to ease that backlash, and to ensure that only the people who really need the discount to make a purchase (that is still profitable to the producer), oftentimes producers will require identification of being in a group. Under the "modern taxonomy" mentioned in the Wikipedia article, this is "direct segmentation."
Perhaps the two best known examples of direct segmentation are student discounts and senior discounts. Those groups are known to, in the aggregate, have lower income than the general population. They are also easily distinguishable due to requiring a student ID or for the seniors, a driver's license.
In conclusion, what the grandparent poster appears to be advocating does not necessarily run afoul of the Clayton Act.
- Neil Wehneman
My legal education, in nifty podcast format
The Vast Rightwing Conspiracy pays people to carry signs at demonstrations - why shouldn't students get some of the action?
--
make install -not war
Logical move as the majority of students are exposed mainly to Linux nowadays. Time will tell if this move will make a significant dent in the movement of adoption of OSS in the industry. More and more universities around the world, not only US, are more or less Linux shops. Think of the next generation of students that will come out of these classes. Pushing more and more OSS and Linux into the industry, thus eroding the very market that makes a nice cache cow for Microsoft today. Then Microsoft will be forced to compete. And I think good things will come out of it, like cheaper Windows packages, not so restrictive EULAs. Actually owning your copy of the purchased software and so forth... think about it.
Dude. This is Microsoft we're talking about. I don't care if they "want to keep with their antitrust agreements," in fact, that would probably be a very convenient argument for them. With a price of $299.99 for a SINGLE INSTALLATION of XP Pro, I can't afford to even bother wth them. In my mind, their product is not worth NEARLY that much. Think about it, you can get a decent new computer for around $500; do you really think that the cost of the operating system should be half of that?
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
It's ripping people off, because you're charging them more than they would pay for an item from the retailer you're getting it from, thereby taking a share of their money they wouldn't give you willingly if they knew. Economically, that's the free market at work. Morally, it's ripping people off.
If people aren't prepared to find the information that I can, then too bad.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Not fraud, but against eBay's TOS--eBay makes one and only one exception to the rule that a seller must possess the item to list it on eBay, and that is for prerelease items (and that has some restrictions of its own). I suggest the OP report this.
If schools know what's good for them, they should make corporate whoring grounds for dismissal. The last thing students need is corporate whores posing as friends.
The students I hear complain about the cost of Photoshop just want a cheap paint program and should go buy Paint Shop Pro ( I look at Adobe and see one of the best pricing structures anywhere in corporate america. Free "viewers" on a non-secret format (PDF), deep discounts for powerful software to people who really need the discount, and reasonable prices for software that's a generation ahead of anything else out there (& don't anyone start a gimp flame-war, you KNOW it's not as powerful as Photoshop) - prices any company that actually needs those features can readily pay.
A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire
Back in the 50's a plum job for dorm dwellers was that of local rep for the tobacco companies. All of the major 'bac outfits had campus reps. Money and a free supply of smokes. Probably went out of style, or at least undergound in the 70's or 80's. But I'm long gone from the campus scene, so I wouldn't really know.
Morally, it is your responsibility to be an honest businessman and not rip anyone off unless you really need the money. Just because they can choose someone else doesn't make deception right. What if you're lying and you don't rip people off? Does the fact that I could talk/write to someone else make it right to lie? Of course not.
Gee, that's almost as bad as corporate whores posing as institutes of learning.
---- My Design, Code, Ruby on Rails blog: http://www.slash7.com/
If you can pardon a comment from an old man who went to college in the last century (1976-80), I would just like to say this type of marketing is nothing new.
When I was in school there were people hired by area travel agents to arrange for groups of students to go spring break trips. The more people this person signed up, the more money he or she earned. (plus a free trip) The shill did not often make it known that someone was paying them to promote the trip. We found out about it when one of them tried to take advantage of the school newspaper's free advertising for students policy.
At the same time, the drinking age was 18. The the local distributors of beer, liquor and wine used terribly original concept of finding the most attractive students to give samples of drinks and pushing more consumption of alchohol . At least these people (mostly female) wore t-shirts that proclaimed their affiliation.
Didn't Daewoo try this for cars in the late 1990s?
This all seems like everyone will now be either a victim of shills, like Truman in the Truman Show, or in on the joke and peddling their warez via product placement. In this case, though, the product is being "placed" in plain old reality.
I don't know about anyone else, I but I would consider such a shill to be a horror of a human being. It's bad enough hanging out with someone who is overly enthusiastic about something that they feel the need to push; but someone who gets paid to do it?
Spamming my social circle? No thanks.
Well, there's no deception. I'm just offering something at a price. Take it or leave it.