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Price Optimization Software Big in Retail Business

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the milking-the-consumer dept.

prostoalex writes "Even if you spent only a single day in an economics class, you're probably familiar with a concept of supply and demand. The Associated Press is running an article on retailers employing mathematical models for price optimization, where some products are priced higher to generate higher margins, and some are discounted to generate larger volumes even at the expense of per-product margins. DemandTec, Oracle and SAP are some of the companies producing those mathematical models for retailers around the country, with AP listing some of the pricing optimizations employed currently."

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  1. Boot Camp? Parallels? What the hell? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    For decades, we Mac users haven't really given a shit what was happening off in PC land. Every few years we'd hear about a new version of Windows, and we'd glance into the abyss just long enough to remind ourselves of Microsoft's eternal cluelessness. Other than that, I think our closest brush with Windows was Word 6, and that was a decade and a half ago.

    So what makes Windows relevant to us now? Who are all these "Mac users" suddenly clamoring for the latest PC news? Are these the same "Mac users" on VersionTracker writing glowing reviews of Firefox and Azureus and—good Jobs—this thing called Macintosh Explorer ? Honestly—who let them in, anyway?

    If you're some sort of tragic square who needs to run Windows, maybe you should have thought of that before you bought a Mac. Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be better to just round up these so-called "Mac users" and send them all on trains to Redmond.