Try to take out an ad in a magazine or anywhere else using Microsoft's Windows logo, which is a trademark, and a URL pointing to your favorite free OS.
I don't know how I can make this any simpler for you. You're confusing the topic.
If Company B uses Company A's trademark within Company B's advertisement, that violates trademark.
BUT... Company B's advertisements on Google do not have Company A's trademarks within the advertisement. Company A's trademarks are elsewhere on the page, and no amount of trademark protection can prevent Company B from putting its advertisement on a page that also has Company A's trademarks. As long as Company B is not putting Company A's trademarks on the page, Company B has nothing to worry about.
The issue is when Company B pays Google to take searches for Company A's trademark and send customers to their website.
Providing notice (and advertising) about competitors is not illegal, unethical, or prohibited under the scope of trademark protection.
The user has no interest in Company B's products if they are searching for Company A's trademark.
I guess Company A doesn't have anything to worry about then!
Around here, we know the difference, but does joe public know? The average Joe might go ahead and buy an OS from microsoft.com, even though his friend told him to get Linux from someone.
If Joe doesn't know the difference, he should probably stick with Windows XP Home Edition.
Because of HR-Equilibrium it won't be wiped out but it also shouldn't spread if it conveys no advantage. Your next 3 parts also relate to the effectiveness of reproduction. If it is able to withstand/survive/propogate, then all of that really comes back to reproduction.
...
Natural selection is a simple thing. It all really comes down to reproduction.
You're simplifying natural selection by reducing the entire phenomenon down to its fulcrum point, reproduction. The many causes and effects, and permutations, of natural selection make it a complex phenomenon.
It seemed that you were referring to someone making a crop which would wipe out other crops by spreading effectively.
Let me give you an example.
A farmer plants his field with a seed mixture of half normal wheat, half GM wheat. To make the example realistic, assume that the wheat is intermixed such that it's impossible to tell which sections of wheat are normal or GM.
Compared to normal wheat, the GM wheat grows twice as quickly but reproduces at half the yield. Over the course of a year, the average yield of GM wheat would be equal to normal wheat.
By the time harvesting comes around, much of the GM wheat would be past the age of ripening, therefore lowering the farmer's overall yield.
Now let's assume that the GM wheat resists cold weather very well. During a harsh cold spell, half the normal wheat dies while the GM wheat remains unaffected. The GM wheat then spreads into the empty space formally occupied by normal wheat that died.
When the cold spell is over, GM wheat would outnumber normal wheat, increasing the chance that the farmer's overall yield would further decline due to the GM wheat being past the age of ripening. Furthermore, the farmer has no real way of killing the GM wheat to allow normal wheat to return.
Now, let's assume the GM wheat has another detrimental side effect - it tastes bad. The farmer is left with mostly bad tasting wheat, a majority of which has been harvested past ripening, and very little valuable crop left.
By the way, all these analogies about billboards and magazines are completely fucking stupid. Analogies are for idiots who can't argue the exact issue being discussed.
Normally I don't reply to flamebait such as this. But I'm hoping that maybe I'll actually be able to inform you, and make you a less ignorant person.
While my examples of billboards and magazines were analogies, they also represented similar circumstances. And as you may know, court rulings which apply to one circumstance often apply to similar circumstances.
In fact, there's a legal term known as "precedence" to describe this. In my example, a court might say "We find our ruling against Company B and order it to remove the billboard and pay a fine to Company A. Our precedent for this decision was the recent ruling of the French court against Google."
So think about that before you write something off as being a completely fucking stupid point presented by an idiot who can't argue the exact issue being discussed.
But Company B cannot use Company A's trademarks to represent its products. That is the issue.
Actually, that's not the issue. You are correct in stating that Company B cannot use Company A's trademarks to represent its products. That much is obvious.
However, let us keep a few things in mind:
The search engine is not run by Company A or Company B. It is run by Google. If the search engine was run by Company B, that would be a different situation.
If Company B advertises its products within the search results of Company A, Company B is not using Company A's trademarks. No where within Company B's advertisements does Company B represent the products as having anything to do with Company A.
A user might infer that Company B and Company A are related because they are returned on the same search results page, but that would be an invalid inference. There are plenty of search results that appear on the same page and yet have nothing to do with each other.
A search engine does not guarantee that the returned results represent the products of any trademark name typed in.
This is the shady part of the law that deals with "intent". "Possession with the intent to distribute". "Assault with the intent to kill".
Unfortunately, because P2P has gotten such a harsh rap, it's easy for a prosecutor to link digital "theft" with the "intent to distribute".
AFAIK, there's no distinction between theft and intent in any existing copyright laws. But I could be wrong. And if it doesn't exist yet, it will soon.
I find this highly unreasonable. Right now, it is permissible for Company A to advertise its products on a huge billboard right in front of Company B's building. Are you suggesting this practice be banned too?
A magazine has an article about Microsoft security. On the adjoining page is a full page advertisement for Red Hat Linux. Should that practice be banned too? Because that's done in nearly every major magazine.
Extend this theory a little farther. A user enters a search for "Mustang", and gets back a link to a website. The user clicks the website, and sees information and advertising regarding both Mustangs and Chevrolets. Is that permissible?
A trademark is just that - a mark under which a company performs trade. A company that owns a trademark is only entitled to protection that guarantees that no other company sells similar products or services under the same trademark.
I fail to see how this protection entitles the obstruction of a competitive free market, just to protect some company who can't compete on other fronts.
We call this type of crop a "weed" and already kill it.
I don't think we already kill it. The farmer I mentioned went bankrupt because he had no way of identifying, or removing, the GM strain of crop from his field.
It's also important to remember that it will only spread if it reproduces more effectively than it's competition.
Not true. It will spread in any of the following conditions:
it reproduces as effectively as it's competition.
it is able to withstand environments factors which cannot be withstood by its competition.
it is able to survive within environments which are not populated by its competition.
it is able to propogate more effectively to new locations not populated by its competition.
Amazingly, most of the commercial games that are fun are just ripoff versions of commercial software as well.:)
Ripped-off and polished, or ripped-off and otherwise improved. Blatant ripoffs with no tangible improvement general don't fare well in the marketplace.
I don't know too much about this topic, but isn't it theoretically possible for someone to develop a strain of GM crop that has detrimental qualities (such as significantly decreased lifespan or yield), and then release that crop into the wild?
I remember that a farmer was successfully sued for having GM crops on his farm which were patented by a corporation. It turns out he didn't purposefully plant that strain of crop; wind currents allowed the GM strain to migrate to his farm, where it then began establishing a foothold amongst the farmer's normal crops.
Norman Borlaug inroduced a hybrid wheat strain to India in 1963. It doubled the wheat's yield per acre, leading to a net increase 20 million tons per year from 12 million tons. So obviously, crop strains have a great impact upon the population.
If you are communicating a complex idea, the language you use must be precise.
Ah hah! Perhaps the problem with Linux/Unix is that it requires the absorbtion of too many complex ideas.
Of my many frequent but short-lived encounters with Linux, I'd try to figure out how to do something. Invariably, I'd read the man page. Then, the topic under investigation would refer to some other cryptic term, which I'm sure is well understood by Linux experts, but not me. So then I'd have to research this other term. Which lead to another term. Soon, I'd be trying to figure out the "big picture" design of all of these thousands of cryptic terms all over the place, just so I could figure out the one thing I was investigating in the first place.
Anyone who uses Linux extensively has less problems, no doubt, due to a fundamentally broader understanding of the operating system, it's approaches, and terminology. But for an outsider trying to figure out how to do one specific thing (like install a program without compiling several DLLs etc.), it's difficult.
I strongly recommend that no one purchase this book without also purchasing the industry bible, "Developing Cryptic Man Pages".
Please, do not rely upon the "Linux Man Page Howto". For example, in the "few thoughts about documentation", the following guidelines are given:
Documentation must be accessible. Documentation must be reliable and accurate.
What about "Documentation must be cryptic!!!" Face it - if you're going to go through the trouble of writing a man page, would you rather have your target audience read it once, or tens and hundreds of times!
Actually, the whole exchange might be just made-up.
The interview is, in fact, a parody. I was unable to find the actual interview online, but I feel I did a succint job in portraying the manner in which the interview tore Carly's marketing-speak apart.
It's easy to see why. I really wish I had the link on hand to share with you, but not even 10 minutes of Googling helped me find a hilarious interview with Carly I read a year ago. It went something like this:
Interviewer: So what is this "Adaptive Enterprise" you're talking about?
Carly: It means that technology is used to fulfill business requirements, and it adapts to changes in business needs.
Interviewer: Isn't that what all technology does?
Carly: No. Today, business needs are forced to adapt to technology, not the other way around.
Interviewer: Are you sure about that? I think IBM and Accenture make alot of money adapting technology to business needs.
Carly: Uhm, yeah I'm sure, today the technology doesn't adapt to business needs. Adaptive Enterprise is all about having technology adapt to business needs.
Interviewer: So, what does that mean exactly? Can you give us some specifics?
Carly: Like, it means if your business needs aren't being met by technology, and you have Adaptive Enterprise, Adaptive Enterprise will adapt to your business needs.
Interviewer: Isn't that what consulting companies like IBM and Accenture do?
Carly: No, because Adaptive Enterprise is like a faucet that you can turn on or off if you need more or less computer power.
Interviewer: So what does that mean, exactly? How can you turn technology on or off like a faucet?
Carly: Adaptive Enterprise is when technology adjusts to meet the demands of business needs.
Anyways, suffice to say, the interview was totally hilarious and played Carly off as a real idiot.
Company representatives labeled stories of a pending management reorganization as unfounded and disputed a Wall Street Journal report that said HP's directors were considering a shift that would delegate some of Fiorina's duties to other executives.
...
"Boards discuss a wide range of topics consistent with their fiduciary responsibilities, and any speculation about these discussions is just that--pure speculation," [HP spokesman Robert] Sherbin said. "While the board did discuss structural changes at its recent meeting, there are no other senior changes due in the near future."
Guess two weeks isn't considered the "near future", huh.
"You don't know; the news last week could have been the first shoe to drop in a larger movement to recalculate leadership at HP, but executive ability didn't seem to be the issue with that move, so much as responding to market conditions," [IDC analyst Roger] Kay said. "Some people have been calling for (Fiorina's ouster) since before the Compaq deal, but I don't see why making such a move right now would necessarily be helpful to the company."
How much money do you make, Roger? I hope you're being paid for something useful.
So it seems that rumors and whispers are often a much more useful prediction of stock performance than industry spokesmen and analysts.
To say nothing of the shenanigans with trying to suppress aftermarket inkjet cartridge suppliers/refillers. Hewlett and Packard would never have condoned such slimy means of boosting profits;
Like it or not, no printer manufacturer these days is going to leave money on the table. Printer manufacturers invest R&D resources to develop printer products specifically for the intent of selling toner and ink. It's just one of the many businesses that take a generic fluid and increase its value a thousand-fold by injecting it into a specific package.
True. But it's also a contractual contraction, meaning that in common English usage, "criteria" is often a substitute for "set of criterions", rather than "criterions". The set itself is singular.
This is similar to how "data" has gained common usage as "set of datums", as opposed to "datums".
Thus, it's not uncommon to hear sentences such as "This criteria is invalid."
So you would feel Dell more trustworthy if they just had the higher price and left it at that?
Yes, actually. I'll lay it out real simple for you. Let's look at a few facts:
Dell's discounts rotate from 0% to 20%, within two weeks.
Thus, there a few possible types of consumers:
Slightly profitable consumers who buy a computer at maximum discount.
Moderately profitable consumers who buy a computer at a midlevel discount.
Hightly profitable consumers who buy a computer at no discount.
Furthermore, there are several subcategories of each:
Highly profitable consumers who don't wait for maximum discount because they don't know about the discounts, or they don't shop for price comparisons.
Moderately profitable consumers who don't wait for maximum discount because they think the midlevel discount will "end at any minute".
Highly profitable and moderately profitable consumers who don't wait for maximum discount because they need the computer immediately, due to circumstances.
Highly profitable and moderately profitable consumers who don't wait for maximum discount because they are impatient. These are the same people who ship everything overnight for $100 extra.
Highly profitable and moderately profitable consumers who don't wait for maximum discount, because the few hundred dollars savings don't mean anything to them.
Slightly profitable consumers who happen to buy a computer at maximum discount through sheer luck.
Slightly profitable consumers who wait for maximum discount before buying a computer.
If more consumers were aware of the tactics that Dell uses, a significantly higher percentage would wait a few days in order to save a few hundred dollars.
If this were to occur, consumers would only buy large quantities of computers during days of maximum discount. This means that very few consumers would buy computers during the other days, which would significantly hurt Dell's ability to move inventory.
Dell would therefore be forced to sell computers at maximum discount all the time, in order to keep inventory moving.
But clearly this doesn't happen. Why? Due to the ignorance of the consumer.
So the bottom line is that Dell has significantly higher profit margins due to the shady way in which it discounts its merchandise at the expense of the consumer, relying on the consumer's ignorance.
Do I think this reduces Dell's trusthworthiness? You better believe it.
How do you think Apple gets away with charging the same high price for its equipment, regardless of the holidays or which specific outlet the equipment is sold through? Because of intense customer loyalty (of which trustworthiness is a prerequisite.)
Your example of seasonal sales and competitive discounting does nothing to counter my argument, because Dell's rotating discounts are arbitrary. Seasonal sales and competitive discounts, on the other hand, occur to stimulate sales and encourage competition, according to the supply and demand curve (winter coats dropping in price during the summer? No kidding! Could it be due to a lack of demand?)
One of the reasons that I've never trusted Dell is that they have "discounts" that rotate on a weekly basis. Today, this laptop might be 10% off, tomorrow, it might be 20% off, and the next week, there might not be any discount. And Dell customer service representatives are very strict about only honoring the discounts that appear that day, regardless of when you bought the product, whether you had a coupon, or when you want to upgrade.
My friend was told by a customer service representative to "wait until next week to place your order, if you think there might be a 20% discount again."
That's such a shady practice that I'll never buy Dell. I'm always afraid I'll be screwed by buying on the wrong day. How is that supposed to inspire consumer confidence?
I'm pretty sure it's not. It's more likely done to generate sales via the "OMG the sale ends tomorrow!" factor, to the millions of consumers who don't realize these discounts cycle on a weekly basis.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know how I can make this any simpler for you. You're confusing the topic.
If Company B uses Company A's trademark within Company B's advertisement, that violates trademark.
BUT... Company B's advertisements on Google do not have Company A's trademarks within the advertisement. Company A's trademarks are elsewhere on the page, and no amount of trademark protection can prevent Company B from putting its advertisement on a page that also has Company A's trademarks. As long as Company B is not putting Company A's trademarks on the page, Company B has nothing to worry about.
Providing notice (and advertising) about competitors is not illegal, unethical, or prohibited under the scope of trademark protection.
The user has no interest in Company B's products if they are searching for Company A's trademark.
I guess Company A doesn't have anything to worry about then!
Around here, we know the difference, but does joe public know? The average Joe might go ahead and buy an OS from microsoft.com, even though his friend told him to get Linux from someone.
If Joe doesn't know the difference, he should probably stick with Windows XP Home Edition.
Sounds like fun to carry.
which then is translated into the student's name by software contained in a handheld device used by teachers to check attendance.
I can see it now: "Hey, Mikey - take my badge and scan it for English class, or I'm gonna beat you up with it!"
Bueller... Bueller... Bueller...
Natural selection is a simple thing. It all really comes down to reproduction.
You're simplifying natural selection by reducing the entire phenomenon down to its fulcrum point, reproduction. The many causes and effects, and permutations, of natural selection make it a complex phenomenon.
It seemed that you were referring to someone making a crop which would wipe out other crops by spreading effectively.
Let me give you an example.
A farmer plants his field with a seed mixture of half normal wheat, half GM wheat. To make the example realistic, assume that the wheat is intermixed such that it's impossible to tell which sections of wheat are normal or GM.
Compared to normal wheat, the GM wheat grows twice as quickly but reproduces at half the yield. Over the course of a year, the average yield of GM wheat would be equal to normal wheat.
By the time harvesting comes around, much of the GM wheat would be past the age of ripening, therefore lowering the farmer's overall yield.
Now let's assume that the GM wheat resists cold weather very well. During a harsh cold spell, half the normal wheat dies while the GM wheat remains unaffected. The GM wheat then spreads into the empty space formally occupied by normal wheat that died.
When the cold spell is over, GM wheat would outnumber normal wheat, increasing the chance that the farmer's overall yield would further decline due to the GM wheat being past the age of ripening. Furthermore, the farmer has no real way of killing the GM wheat to allow normal wheat to return.
Now, let's assume the GM wheat has another detrimental side effect - it tastes bad. The farmer is left with mostly bad tasting wheat, a majority of which has been harvested past ripening, and very little valuable crop left.
Normally I don't reply to flamebait such as this. But I'm hoping that maybe I'll actually be able to inform you, and make you a less ignorant person.
While my examples of billboards and magazines were analogies, they also represented similar circumstances. And as you may know, court rulings which apply to one circumstance often apply to similar circumstances.
In fact, there's a legal term known as "precedence" to describe this. In my example, a court might say "We find our ruling against Company B and order it to remove the billboard and pay a fine to Company A. Our precedent for this decision was the recent ruling of the French court against Google."
So think about that before you write something off as being a completely fucking stupid point presented by an idiot who can't argue the exact issue being discussed.
Actually, that's not the issue. You are correct in stating that Company B cannot use Company A's trademarks to represent its products. That much is obvious.
However, let us keep a few things in mind:
A user might infer that Company B and Company A are related because they are returned on the same search results page, but that would be an invalid inference. There are plenty of search results that appear on the same page and yet have nothing to do with each other.
Unfortunately, because P2P has gotten such a harsh rap, it's easy for a prosecutor to link digital "theft" with the "intent to distribute".
AFAIK, there's no distinction between theft and intent in any existing copyright laws. But I could be wrong. And if it doesn't exist yet, it will soon.
In which world do you live?
I find this highly unreasonable. Right now, it is permissible for Company A to advertise its products on a huge billboard right in front of Company B's building. Are you suggesting this practice be banned too?
A magazine has an article about Microsoft security. On the adjoining page is a full page advertisement for Red Hat Linux. Should that practice be banned too? Because that's done in nearly every major magazine.
Extend this theory a little farther. A user enters a search for "Mustang", and gets back a link to a website. The user clicks the website, and sees information and advertising regarding both Mustangs and Chevrolets. Is that permissible?
A trademark is just that - a mark under which a company performs trade. A company that owns a trademark is only entitled to protection that guarantees that no other company sells similar products or services under the same trademark.
I fail to see how this protection entitles the obstruction of a competitive free market, just to protect some company who can't compete on other fronts.
I don't think we already kill it. The farmer I mentioned went bankrupt because he had no way of identifying, or removing, the GM strain of crop from his field.
It's also important to remember that it will only spread if it reproduces more effectively than it's competition.
Not true. It will spread in any of the following conditions:
- it reproduces as effectively as it's competition.
- it is able to withstand environments factors which cannot be withstood by its competition.
- it is able to survive within environments which are not populated by its competition.
- it is able to propogate more effectively to new locations not populated by its competition.
Natural selection is a complex thing.I sure hope they start the Personal Federation of Planets! Sign me up!
Ripped-off and polished, or ripped-off and otherwise improved. Blatant ripoffs with no tangible improvement general don't fare well in the marketplace.
I remember that a farmer was successfully sued for having GM crops on his farm which were patented by a corporation. It turns out he didn't purposefully plant that strain of crop; wind currents allowed the GM strain to migrate to his farm, where it then began establishing a foothold amongst the farmer's normal crops.
Norman Borlaug inroduced a hybrid wheat strain to India in 1963. It doubled the wheat's yield per acre, leading to a net increase 20 million tons per year from 12 million tons. So obviously, crop strains have a great impact upon the population.
Ah hah! Perhaps the problem with Linux/Unix is that it requires the absorbtion of too many complex ideas.
Of my many frequent but short-lived encounters with Linux, I'd try to figure out how to do something. Invariably, I'd read the man page. Then, the topic under investigation would refer to some other cryptic term, which I'm sure is well understood by Linux experts, but not me. So then I'd have to research this other term. Which lead to another term. Soon, I'd be trying to figure out the "big picture" design of all of these thousands of cryptic terms all over the place, just so I could figure out the one thing I was investigating in the first place.
Anyone who uses Linux extensively has less problems, no doubt, due to a fundamentally broader understanding of the operating system, it's approaches, and terminology. But for an outsider trying to figure out how to do one specific thing (like install a program without compiling several DLLs etc.), it's difficult.
Please, do not rely upon the "Linux Man Page Howto". For example, in the "few thoughts about documentation", the following guidelines are given:
Documentation must be accessible.
Documentation must be reliable and accurate.
What about "Documentation must be cryptic!!!" Face it - if you're going to go through the trouble of writing a man page, would you rather have your target audience read it once, or tens and hundreds of times!
The interview is, in fact, a parody. I was unable to find the actual interview online, but I feel I did a succint job in portraying the manner in which the interview tore Carly's marketing-speak apart.
Did the EFF just beat Google to the punch on a "Server Search" app?
It's easy to see why. I really wish I had the link on hand to share with you, but not even 10 minutes of Googling helped me find a hilarious interview with Carly I read a year ago. It went something like this:
Interviewer: So what is this "Adaptive Enterprise" you're talking about?
Carly: It means that technology is used to fulfill business requirements, and it adapts to changes in business needs.
Interviewer: Isn't that what all technology does?
Carly: No. Today, business needs are forced to adapt to technology, not the other way around.
Interviewer: Are you sure about that? I think IBM and Accenture make alot of money adapting technology to business needs.
Carly: Uhm, yeah I'm sure, today the technology doesn't adapt to business needs. Adaptive Enterprise is all about having technology adapt to business needs.
Interviewer: So, what does that mean exactly? Can you give us some specifics?
Carly: Like, it means if your business needs aren't being met by technology, and you have Adaptive Enterprise, Adaptive Enterprise will adapt to your business needs.
Interviewer: Isn't that what consulting companies like IBM and Accenture do?
Carly: No, because Adaptive Enterprise is like a faucet that you can turn on or off if you need more or less computer power.
Interviewer: So what does that mean, exactly? How can you turn technology on or off like a faucet?
Carly: Adaptive Enterprise is when technology adjusts to meet the demands of business needs.
Anyways, suffice to say, the interview was totally hilarious and played Carly off as a real idiot.
http://news.com.com/HP+Were+not+changing+Fiorinas+ job/2100-7341_3-5547456.html
... Guess two weeks isn't considered the "near future", huh. How much money do you make, Roger? I hope you're being paid for something useful.So it seems that rumors and whispers are often a much more useful prediction of stock performance than industry spokesmen and analysts.
Like it or not, no printer manufacturer these days is going to leave money on the table. Printer manufacturers invest R&D resources to develop printer products specifically for the intent of selling toner and ink. It's just one of the many businesses that take a generic fluid and increase its value a thousand-fold by injecting it into a specific package.
True. But it's also a contractual contraction, meaning that in common English usage, "criteria" is often a substitute for "set of criterions", rather than "criterions". The set itself is singular.
This is similar to how "data" has gained common usage as "set of datums", as opposed to "datums".
Thus, it's not uncommon to hear sentences such as "This criteria is invalid."
Thanks to the RIAA, I want to avoid anything having to do with digital music players and "raids".
Fortunately, by the time that Longhorn is released, everyone will be running Firefox on Google's forthcoming operating system.
Space. Quite a bit of it, I hope.
Oh, you meant what criteria separates planets from stars?
Well, I definitely would much rather live on one than the other. Is that a good definition?
Yes, actually. I'll lay it out real simple for you. Let's look at a few facts:
- Dell's discounts rotate from 0% to 20%, within two weeks.
- Thus, there a few possible types of consumers:
- Slightly profitable consumers who buy a computer at maximum discount.
- Moderately profitable consumers who buy a computer at a midlevel discount.
- Hightly profitable consumers who buy a computer at no discount.
- Furthermore, there are several subcategories of each:
- Highly profitable consumers who don't wait for maximum discount because they don't know about the discounts, or they don't shop for price comparisons.
- Moderately profitable consumers who don't wait for maximum discount because they think the midlevel discount will "end at any minute".
- Highly profitable and moderately profitable consumers who don't wait for maximum discount because they need the computer immediately, due to circumstances.
- Highly profitable and moderately profitable consumers who don't wait for maximum discount because they are impatient. These are the same people who ship everything overnight for $100 extra.
- Highly profitable and moderately profitable consumers who don't wait for maximum discount, because the few hundred dollars savings don't mean anything to them.
- Slightly profitable consumers who happen to buy a computer at maximum discount through sheer luck.
- Slightly profitable consumers who wait for maximum discount before buying a computer.
- If more consumers were aware of the tactics that Dell uses, a significantly higher percentage would wait a few days in order to save a few hundred dollars.
- If this were to occur, consumers would only buy large quantities of computers during days of maximum discount. This means that very few consumers would buy computers during the other days, which would significantly hurt Dell's ability to move inventory.
- Dell would therefore be forced to sell computers at maximum discount all the time, in order to keep inventory moving.
- But clearly this doesn't happen. Why? Due to the ignorance of the consumer.
So the bottom line is that Dell has significantly higher profit margins due to the shady way in which it discounts its merchandise at the expense of the consumer, relying on the consumer's ignorance.Do I think this reduces Dell's trusthworthiness? You better believe it.
How do you think Apple gets away with charging the same high price for its equipment, regardless of the holidays or which specific outlet the equipment is sold through? Because of intense customer loyalty (of which trustworthiness is a prerequisite.)
Your example of seasonal sales and competitive discounting does nothing to counter my argument, because Dell's rotating discounts are arbitrary. Seasonal sales and competitive discounts, on the other hand, occur to stimulate sales and encourage competition, according to the supply and demand curve (winter coats dropping in price during the summer? No kidding! Could it be due to a lack of demand?)
My friend was told by a customer service representative to "wait until next week to place your order, if you think there might be a 20% discount again."
That's such a shady practice that I'll never buy Dell. I'm always afraid I'll be screwed by buying on the wrong day. How is that supposed to inspire consumer confidence?
I'm pretty sure it's not. It's more likely done to generate sales via the "OMG the sale ends tomorrow!" factor, to the millions of consumers who don't realize these discounts cycle on a weekly basis.