Quote:
|
HP’s TouchPad experiment showed what price matters to consumers and the path to market share gains on Apple.
|
It's not really an experiment, it's a, we're no longer in that business yet have a lot of dead stock making our books look bad. Rather than having a 500 million* loss in stock and the expensive of taking returns from retailers plus disposing of those returns, lets sell them off at a price people can't refuse even though they know the device is discontinued, then the stock is gone and they've only lost 400 million* instead.
It might have been a different story if they'd been able to actually build them for less and but as is they're going to be making a huge loss on each sale, so it's not really a price that any other tablet maker would consider. Even Amazon who could possibly sell at a loss with a view to making money on the long tail of book sales would be a little nuts to consider it, since tablets are so multi purpose there'd be no guarantee people would buy books for it
What it does show though, is what we've known all along, people cannot pass up a bargin, even if they might not really need it. If Amazon sells their tablet at £400 will it take off? Maybe. But if they then do a huge price discount as a limited sale I'd bet they'll sell the lot
Just a matter of how far they could discount before they hit cost.
* Figures are made up to illustrate the point**
** Point made up to illustrate the figures*