But what does a company built around making inexpensive PCs know about HDTVs?
Answer - Nothing. Dell printers are Lexmark. Dell Notebooks are Acer. Dell plasmas are probably BenQ's or some other cheap import brand with their name on them.
Dell = Excellent marketing company. Excellent PC company, if you count sticking together other companies motherboards and processors as manufacturing. But you can't have your finger in all pieces of the pie at once. They would go broke actually opening a factory for every new product line they delve into.
R&D Department? Dell's R&D per percentage of sales is a fraction of that compared to IBM or HP.
Am I bashing Dell? Hell no, I wish I owned some stock.
As of now... January 11th 2005 17:23:09 Up 6 day(s), 8 hour(s) 9 min(s) 2832
Inspired by a thinkgeek april fool's day joke, the iGrill is a 600Mhz Mini-ITX motherboard, an 80GB hard drive, and a 250W PSU, running Gentoo Linux, all enclosed in a George Foreman grill. Technically it's lost the grilling-functionality, but with a bit of tin foil on top of the heatsink and a fork-bomb, I reckon I could probably still fry an egg with it.
I work for a large IT reseller. We do a LOT of servers. We're talking IBM & HP.
I have yet to find a client that can continue business with 3 or 4 days of downtime.
What could you live without for that long that would be running on that server?? Are you going to go that long without your email, DB server, or web server?
Find me a company, i don't care what size, where 4 days of downtime in acceptable. I'd like a job there.
Reward for Columbian Drug Lord... $5 million dollars
Aid to friends in Asia in time of need... $35 million dollars.
Ocuppying a broke harmless country and robbing it of its national resources to benefit your home economy that would otherwise be stagnant due to lack of real innovation in any major industry sector as its currency tumbles aided by the biggest federal budget deficit in history... PRICELESS
There's some things money can't buy, for everything else there's no money anyway, so do what i say or my army will hunt you... (tm)
Grocery stores usually operate on razor thin margins, too--their profit is maybe one or two percent of sales. To replace a hundred dollar shopping cart blows their profit on ten thousand dollars' worth of merchandise.
um, no they DON'T.
Do you really think anyone would be in a business where they profit 1% of sales?
Like any business grocery stores have loss leaders and high money items.
Duke Nukem Forever to be released November 20th. Hell has frozen over; monkeys are flying out my butt and god, does it sting like a bastard. And stink.
I agree with many here... 7 hours is a LOT of time.
Why not also produce a second cut, that is closer to like and hour and a half, and have the 7 hours as the supplementary part... and include them both together. Hardcore people could see the 7 hour part, or if were interested in one aspect of the documentary, if the chapters were done right, find that expanded chapter and watch it.
The guy makes not much more than minimum wage, and gets no commision. I knew the then owner of the store, etc. He was being honest, he probably just got sick of selling rap music that day.
That makes sense, point taken.
I do wonder though, do you think a job which you are not paid much money for (a little above minimum wage) isn't worth taking pride in and doing your best?
I believe it was the last time that I bought more than 1 cd at a time at a local record store, the guy was ringing up my stuff, and commented "Its rare to see someone buy good music, most people just buy crap" or something like that.
Anyway, this was a real record store, it sells used CDs and stuff, and hires employees that actually know things about music, they play music in the store, etc. You know what I'm talking about.
He also has a vested interest in making you feel liked and coming back. It's like when I go in a guitar store, play smells like teen spirit, make a purchase, and the guy is like "wow you're a ripping guitar player." damn right I am , I am spending money in your store.
I have yet to hear of any smaller record stores heading to Best Buy to buy CDs and then resell them in their stores, probably because the costs involved are greater than the few cents they save (labor, transportatio, etc.)
Have you conducted some survey of independent record stores or to find out if they would do such a thing?
They aren't saving a few cents they they are saving - 12 - 9.70 = almost 8%. Sure there are costs involved but somebody has to pay similar costs as well if they order them from the regional distributor at 12 bucks a piece. (and a small guy is probably stuck with the distributor, who probably is actually buying from the the record company at 12 bucks a piece. He probably sells high volume, and just marks them up to 13.00.)
And if you read the rest of my post you would see how I explained that a lot of people could buy from walmarts secondary market people. All resellers occasionally buy more stock than they can sell, and sell it off to get rid of it, sometimes in retail, sometimes to another reseller. If walmart gets a drastically better price for the cds, it opens the doors for them to resell those units to third party retailers, unless they have a contract that expressly forbids it. Even then I guarantee you stuff like that still goes on just in an under the radar fashion.
Walmart does this with every one of their suppliers. They force them into selling to them at a lower price than anyone else; the suppliers will sell their products at the old price to all the other retailers. This might not harm the record industry as much as it has hurt other businesses, but often times it forces the suppliers to cut jobs and find short term solutions to save a few bucks (sacrificing quality) in order to meet Walmart's demands.
If Walmart and other stores buy these cds for $12, and sells them for 9.72, and then the record company starts selling them to walmart for 8.50, then guess what. Small independent record stores can go to walmart, by a stack of CDs for cheaper than they can from the record company. There is probably nothing the record companies can do to stop them. So the record companies will have to lower prices for those Walmart aimed titles across the board. Probably larger chain retailers, like FYE stores, couldn't benifit from this, as much, but any reseller has a secondary market dept. In other words, and FYE buyer (they own coconuts, strawberries, most of those mall record stores), can call up a wallmart secondary market person and say "hey , we want 10k copies of the backstreet boys". So in effect the record companies will have to at least partially lower their prices to non-walmart retailers.
"Paying fifteen dollars for a piece of music is a difficult value equation for customers."
WOW! Is it ever. Apparently Walmart marketers understand the music biz better than the music biz people.
At Wal-Mart, we're a commodity and have to fight for shelf space like Colgate fights for shelf space."
Which is why people go to walmart. Walmart is like a commodity store. Are we going to sell the new Eminem CD based on the "Intrinsic Value" of the liner notes or the number of hits on the CD?
Then the article says: Unlike a typical Tower store, which stocks 60,000 titles, an average Wal-Mart carries about 5,000 CDs.
and then
. "When you're buying CDs for twelve dollars and selling them for ten like Wal-Mart, it makes the rest of us look like we're gouging the customer, when we're not," says Don Van Cleave, head of the Coalition for Independent Music Stores, a retail consortium. "It's supertough to compete with that price point."
Well, Don Van Cleave, there you go! Your message to consumers needs to be, your prices are higher, but they have to be because you carry a much larger inventory and your large selection is a service your store is providing. Have tastes that go beyond the top of the charts? Well guess what, your music is in our store, and for the selection we have our price while still not the best, they are very fair. Now you're not selling a commodity. You are selling a service. You are selling expertise that perhaps your music staff has. But instead, you people try to do the same thing - push the hits.
My girlfriend took a temporary position at a cocunuts store here in town. And let me tell you, they don't get the sell based on value thing. They push the hits, hits, hits. The kind of CDs you will listen to for a month or two and then forget. How is that kind of CD worth $15? It's not. She has pretty diverse tastes, and has broken "company code" by playing other "non-corporate approved" kinds of music,a nd has had a lot of sucess selling it. She figures every time she plays something, even if it's old, she has 5 or 6 people that ask "What is this?It's interesting". And a lot of them buy it. Now imagine what could happen if the whole store's marketing was geared that way. You could sell a good amount of that older or lesser known stuff, for a higher price. And you could still take the hits, and trim the price way down, as a loss leader, to get people in the first place. Maybe you can't go sub-cost like walmart, but you can get down close.
Kudos to Walmart for beating the record industries margins down. As long as they only stock 5000 cds in each store, independent retailers should have no worries if they figure out how to position themselves correctly. The beauty of this is it could also force the record companies to sell to distributors and record stores for a lower price, actually helping the smaller guys.
What gives? There's nothing about me, Pam Anderson, and Jenna Jameson spending a night together in here! Just something about some guys Cecil and Kane!
And with a detached member. Like that "detachable penis" song by king missle.
Methinks a lot of people have put too much thought into attack kerry and bush today on "debate cheating" issues. Obviously someone would have seen Kerry do that if the camera could.
The related ear-piece bush story was equally as moronic.
I'm with you man, I want a government that represents the vast majority of the nation too. But how would it be better if people just go out and vote for the hell of it because it's "the hip thing to do?"
If you don't vote, I for one think your opinion is still valid. Maybe only one issue concerns you and both candidates support it.
Like the patriot act.
It's not worth voting if they both support it. So I could vote or not vote, it won't make a difference.
But I sure as hell can raise a voice to get my opinion across afterwards.
Voting is just one tool to be active in your government people. If I didn't vote , should I still not be allowed to run for a public office? Of course not.
Another get out and vote drive. It's cool they use video game characters. But I can't help but feel these "public service announcments" are politically motivated.
Before I seem like a troll, lets consider:
Anyone who is not a felon, at least 18, and not an african american from florida, can register to vote. *drumroll*! I'm just kidding. That last part was uncalled for. But disenfranchised voters is another discussion, and a more serious one. So lets just say, most people who are 18 and not in jail can vote. They have the right. Politically motivated disenfranchising laws aside.
Why do we care if people vote or not? Why do we try to chide them into it? If you are directly affected by the policies of your elected officials, you will probably vote. If you don't care, why should you be made to vote?
And then they have these voter drives. Why does MTV care if their viewers vote? I'm guessing somewhere somebody has statistics that shows men 18-24 or whatever their demographic is, is "predominatly left" or "predominantly right". So, lets use propaganda to mobilize them. Lets mobilize a flock of voters that carry our view.
Its dumb, if you care vote, if you don't, don't. I certainly don't care if you do or not. The only crime is if you do care and you don't vote.
A much more serious issue is voter disenfranchisement - people who do care, who would vote, who are silenced. That is a huge issue. Why dont we see any commercials with video game charactars that say "voter disenfranchisment is bad"?
I like civic participation but i'm for civic knowledge first, if you don't care, don't go in and blindly pick because MTV tells you too! That doesn't help anyone.
Just because something gives you pleasure and you keep doing it doesn't make you addicted.
For example,I engage in sex with my girlfriend regularly. If she left tommorow, I would sure miss it, however, I wouldn't roll up in a ball and die. We have sex a lot. I mean a lot. Why not enjoy it while you have it?
I engage in playing music regularly. That sure is pleasurable. In fact, I spend a lot of time and money in pursuit of that hobby (actually, i've gotten smarter and actually probably profit a modest amount, even after transportation costs).
Athletes get "high" from excercise. I used to be "addicted" to it too. In fact, I intend to start the addiction again soon. After a strenous workout, you feel so so great for the rest of the day. Then the next day you feel in the dumps. This is because of different hormones that are released while you are under extreme physical durrest. Are these guys addicts?
I'd like to reclassify an addict as someone who does something to a harmful degree. Drinking so much they miss work, playing games so much they miss work, excercising so much they injure themsevles over and over again, etc. Otherwise, if I am a hard worker, and I enjoy the pleasure after a hard days work, am I now a work addict?
Or better, lets reclassify it as people hurting themselves by directly chemically changing the chemicals in your body for pleasure. But anything other than this. This seems a weak attempt to make a sensational story. And to make other people live like you think they should.
Slashdot Mirror
But what does a company built around making inexpensive PCs know about HDTVs?
Answer - Nothing. Dell printers are Lexmark. Dell Notebooks are Acer. Dell plasmas are probably BenQ's or some other cheap import brand with their name on them.
Dell = Excellent marketing company. Excellent PC company, if you count sticking together other companies motherboards and processors as manufacturing. But you can't have your finger in all pieces of the pie at once. They would go broke actually opening a factory for every new product line they delve into.
R&D Department? Dell's R&D per percentage of sales is a fraction of that compared to IBM or HP.
Am I bashing Dell? Hell no, I wish I owned some stock.
As of now... January 11th 2005 17:23:09
Up 6 day(s), 8 hour(s) 9 min(s)
2832
Inspired by a thinkgeek april fool's day joke, the iGrill is a 600Mhz Mini-ITX motherboard, an 80GB hard drive, and a 250W PSU, running Gentoo Linux, all enclosed in a George Foreman grill. Technically it's lost the grilling-functionality, but with a bit of tin foil on top of the heatsink and a fork-bomb, I reckon I could probably still fry an egg with it.
And yes, this webserver is hosted on the grill.
I work for a large IT reseller. We do a LOT of servers. We're talking IBM & HP.
I have yet to find a client that can continue business with 3 or 4 days of downtime.
What could you live without for that long that would be running on that server?? Are you going to go that long without your email, DB server, or web server?
Find me a company, i don't care what size, where 4 days of downtime in acceptable. I'd like a job there.
Reward for Columbian Drug Lord ... $5 million dollars
Aid to friends in Asia in time of need... $35 million dollars.
Ocuppying a broke harmless country and robbing it of its national resources to benefit your home economy that would otherwise be stagnant due to lack of real innovation in any major industry sector as its currency tumbles aided by the biggest federal budget deficit in history... PRICELESS
There's some things money can't buy, for everything else there's no money anyway, so do what i say or my army will hunt you... (tm)
netcraft confirms it
Grocery stores usually operate on razor thin margins, too--their profit is maybe one or two percent of sales. To replace a hundred dollar shopping cart blows their profit on ten thousand dollars' worth of merchandise.
um, no they DON'T.
Do you really think anyone would be in a business where they profit 1% of sales?
Like any business grocery stores have loss leaders and high money items.
The deli is one example of a high profit center.
and all I got was this lousy erection that won't go away!
Duke Nukem Forever to be released November 20th. Hell has frozen over; monkeys are flying out my butt and god, does it sting like a bastard. And stink.
I agree with many here... 7 hours is a LOT of time.
Why not also produce a second cut, that is closer to like and hour and a half, and have the 7 hours as the supplementary part... and include them both together. Hardcore people could see the 7 hour part, or if were interested in one aspect of the documentary, if the chapters were done right, find that expanded chapter and watch it.
The guy makes not much more than minimum wage, and gets no commision. I knew the then owner of the store, etc. He was being honest, he probably just got sick of selling rap music that day.
That makes sense, point taken.
I do wonder though, do you think a job which you are not paid much money for (a little above minimum wage) isn't worth taking pride in and doing your best?
I believe it was the last time that I bought more than 1 cd at a time at a local record store, the guy was ringing up my stuff, and commented "Its rare to see someone buy good music, most people just buy crap" or something like that.
Anyway, this was a real record store, it sells used CDs and stuff, and hires employees that actually know things about music, they play music in the store, etc. You know what I'm talking about.
He also has a vested interest in making you feel liked and coming back. It's like when I go in a guitar store, play smells like teen spirit, make a purchase, and the guy is like "wow you're a ripping guitar player." damn right I am , I am spending money in your store.
I have yet to hear of any smaller record stores heading to Best Buy to buy CDs and then resell them in their stores, probably because the costs involved are greater than the few cents they save (labor, transportatio, etc.)
Have you conducted some survey of independent record stores or to find out if they would do such a thing?
They aren't saving a few cents they they are saving - 12 - 9.70 = almost 8%. Sure there are costs involved but somebody has to pay similar costs as well if they order them from the regional distributor at 12 bucks a piece. (and a small guy is probably stuck with the distributor, who probably is actually buying from the the record company at 12 bucks a piece. He probably sells high volume, and just marks them up to 13.00.)
And if you read the rest of my post you would see how I explained that a lot of people could buy from walmarts secondary market people. All resellers occasionally buy more stock than they can sell, and sell it off to get rid of it, sometimes in retail, sometimes to another reseller. If walmart gets a drastically better price for the cds, it opens the doors for them to resell those units to third party retailers, unless they have a contract that expressly forbids it. Even then I guarantee you stuff like that still goes on just in an under the radar fashion.
Walmart does this with every one of their suppliers. They force them into selling to them at a lower price than anyone else; the suppliers will sell their products at the old price to all the other retailers. This might not harm the record industry as much as it has hurt other businesses, but often times it forces the suppliers to cut jobs and find short term solutions to save a few bucks (sacrificing quality) in order to meet Walmart's demands.
If Walmart and other stores buy these cds for $12, and sells them for 9.72, and then the record company starts selling them to walmart for 8.50, then guess what. Small independent record stores can go to walmart, by a stack of CDs for cheaper than they can from the record company. There is probably nothing the record companies can do to stop them. So the record companies will have to lower prices for those Walmart aimed titles across the board. Probably larger chain retailers, like FYE stores, couldn't benifit from this, as much, but any reseller has a secondary market dept. In other words, and FYE buyer (they own coconuts, strawberries, most of those mall record stores), can call up a wallmart secondary market person and say "hey , we want 10k copies of the backstreet boys". So in effect the record companies will have to at least partially lower their prices to non-walmart retailers.
Pope is catholic
Come on, is this news ???
It will be if somebody would post a
"Paying fifteen dollars for a piece of music is a difficult value equation for customers."
WOW! Is it ever. Apparently Walmart marketers understand the music biz better than the music biz people.
At Wal-Mart, we're a commodity and have to fight for shelf space like Colgate fights for shelf space."
Which is why people go to walmart. Walmart is like a commodity store. Are we going to sell the new Eminem CD based on the "Intrinsic Value" of the liner notes or the number of hits on the CD?
Then the article says:
Unlike a typical Tower store, which stocks 60,000 titles, an average Wal-Mart carries about 5,000 CDs.
and then
. "When you're buying CDs for twelve dollars and selling them for ten like Wal-Mart, it makes the rest of us look like we're gouging the customer, when we're not," says Don Van Cleave, head of the Coalition for Independent Music Stores, a retail consortium. "It's supertough to compete with that price point."
Well, Don Van Cleave, there you go! Your message to consumers needs to be, your prices are higher, but they have to be because you carry a much larger inventory and your large selection is a service your store is providing. Have tastes that go beyond the top of the charts? Well guess what, your music is in our store, and for the selection we have our price while still not the best, they are very fair. Now you're not selling a commodity. You are selling a service. You are selling expertise that perhaps your music staff has. But instead, you people try to do the same thing - push the hits.
My girlfriend took a temporary position at a cocunuts store here in town. And let me tell you, they don't get the sell based on value thing. They push the hits, hits, hits. The kind of CDs you will listen to for a month or two and then forget. How is that kind of CD worth $15? It's not. She has pretty diverse tastes, and has broken "company code" by playing other "non-corporate approved" kinds of music,a nd has had a lot of sucess selling it. She figures every time she plays something, even if it's old, she has 5 or 6 people that ask "What is this?It's interesting". And a lot of them buy it. Now imagine what could happen if the whole store's marketing was geared that way. You could sell a good amount of that older or lesser known stuff, for a higher price. And you could still take the hits, and trim the price way down, as a loss leader, to get people in the first place. Maybe you can't go sub-cost like walmart, but you can get down close.
Kudos to Walmart for beating the record industries margins down. As long as they only stock 5000 cds in each store, independent retailers should have no worries if they figure out how to position themselves correctly. The beauty of this is it could also force the record companies to sell to distributors and record stores for a lower price, actually helping the smaller guys.
What gives? There's nothing about me, Pam Anderson, and Jenna Jameson spending a night together in here! Just something about some guys Cecil and Kane!
President Bush expected to have "lifeline" to God in Friday night's debate.
Kerry to be replaced by super-knolwedgelable vietnam vetran alien from mars clone.
And with a detached member. Like that "detachable penis" song by king missle.
Methinks a lot of people have put too much thought into attack kerry and bush today on "debate cheating" issues. Obviously someone would have seen Kerry do that if the camera could.
The related ear-piece bush story was equally as moronic.
I sent this around in an email at work to my team to be funny.
From: Boss
To: Employees
Subj: Job growth data
-
Hello! I wanted to forward around the following job growth data.
96,000 new jobs added the month of september.
NOW GET TO WORK AND STOP READING STUPID EMAILS OR YOU'LL BE LOOKING FOR ONE OF THEM!!
Signed,
Your Boss
Sorry fellas, didn't save my formatting, i'm an idiot.
Mario's hot girlfriend:
OvO
Original MARIO:
0
-{}-
Pre rendered, pixellated mario
.
.
.
MARIO ON JENNY CRAIG:
0 ---- I'm so weak and hungry!
-|-
Atari 2600 Mario:
I'm with you man, I want a government that represents the vast majority of the nation too. But how would it be better if people just go out and vote for the hell of it because it's "the hip thing to do?"
That brings up a good point.
If you don't vote, I for one think your opinion is still valid. Maybe only one issue concerns you and both candidates support it.
Like the patriot act.
It's not worth voting if they both support it. So I could vote or not vote, it won't make a difference.
But I sure as hell can raise a voice to get my opinion across afterwards.
Voting is just one tool to be active in your government people. If I didn't vote , should I still not be allowed to run for a public office? Of course not.
Another get out and vote drive. It's cool they use video game characters. But I can't help but feel these "public service announcments" are politically motivated.
Before I seem like a troll, lets consider:
Anyone who is not a felon, at least 18, and not an african american from florida, can register to vote. *drumroll*! I'm just kidding. That last part was uncalled for. But disenfranchised voters is another discussion, and a more serious one. So lets just say, most people who are 18 and not in jail can vote. They have the right. Politically motivated disenfranchising laws aside.
Why do we care if people vote or not? Why do we try to chide them into it? If you are directly affected by the policies of your elected officials, you will probably vote. If you don't care, why should you be made to vote?
And then they have these voter drives. Why does MTV care if their viewers vote? I'm guessing somewhere somebody has statistics that shows men 18-24 or whatever their demographic is, is "predominatly left" or "predominantly right". So, lets use propaganda to mobilize them. Lets mobilize a flock of voters that carry our view.
Its dumb, if you care vote, if you don't, don't. I certainly don't care if you do or not. The only crime is if you do care and you don't vote.
A much more serious issue is voter disenfranchisement - people who do care, who would vote, who are silenced. That is a huge issue. Why dont we see any commercials with video game charactars that say "voter disenfranchisment is bad"?
I like civic participation but i'm for civic knowledge first, if you don't care, don't go in and blindly pick because MTV tells you too! That doesn't help anyone.
Just because something gives you pleasure and you keep doing it doesn't make you addicted.
For example,I engage in sex with my girlfriend regularly. If she left tommorow, I would sure miss it, however, I wouldn't roll up in a ball and die. We have sex a lot. I mean a lot. Why not enjoy it while you have it?
I engage in playing music regularly. That sure is pleasurable. In fact, I spend a lot of time and money in pursuit of that hobby (actually, i've gotten smarter and actually probably profit a modest amount, even after transportation costs).
Athletes get "high" from excercise. I used to be "addicted" to it too. In fact, I intend to start the addiction again soon. After a strenous workout, you feel so so great for the rest of the day. Then the next day you feel in the dumps. This is because of different hormones that are released while you are under extreme physical durrest. Are these guys addicts?
I'd like to reclassify an addict as someone who does something to a harmful degree. Drinking so much they miss work, playing games so much they miss work, excercising so much they injure themsevles over and over again, etc. Otherwise, if I am a hard worker, and I enjoy the pleasure after a hard days work, am I now a work addict?
Or better, lets reclassify it as people hurting themselves by directly chemically changing the chemicals in your body for pleasure. But anything other than this. This seems a weak attempt to make a sensational story. And to make other people live like you think they should.