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Keurig Stock Drops, Says It Was Wrong About DRM Coffee Pods
An anonymous reader writes: Green Mountain (Keurig) stock dropped by 10% this morning after a brutal earnings report. The reason? CNN Money reports that DRM has weakened sales of their Keurig 2.0. CEO Brian Kelley admits, "Quite honestly, we were wrong." Last year Green Mountain decided to make their new coffee machines work with licensed pods only. The company says they now plan to license more outside brands, and bring back “My K-Cup” reusable filters.
Turns out their DRM consists of a colored rim on the pod. Taping a used v2 lid on to a v1 pod is all it takes.
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
Make your product better than your imitators! That's all you need to do. Why does everyone buy SD, PNY, Adata, and Silicon Power flash drives over those much cheaper no-name brand Hong Kong wonders on ebay? Because they lie about the speeds, they fail in about a week, and they're made with flimsy materials. Why do people go to Starbucks instead of Kwik Trip (or Seven Eleven for you southerners) for their coffee? Because Starbucks' product is better. That or because they're hippie douchebags. Either way, if you make your product better, your competitors get no business.
No, they've learned a few things:
1: People care about what brands of coffee they drink.
2: Limiting choices there makes them look like the bad guy.
They think (and may well be right...) that by making this apology and opening up the choices on what coffee people make using their coffeemakers, that people won't notice that they're still limiting their choices on coffeemakers.
They've learned to pick their battles and manipulate opinion.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
nespresso is even worse the k-cup. Though they both are pretty bad. an awful lot of waste for some convenience.
me? I grind my own beans and put them into the portafilter of my 20-year-old Saeco espresso machine -- it won't die. The only waste is the spent coffee, and I feed that to my compost heap.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
My 20 year old Saeco Vienna superautomatic just grinds, tamps, brews and foams with barely a microcontroller in there and physical buttons. No LCD, no IoT, no touch screen, no flavors, no DRM.
Until they can DRM individual coffee beans, I'm never changing.
Mostly random stuff.