Following on Dell’s recent announcement about simplifying pricing, I got an email from the Texas computer company telling me: New simplified prices on Inspiron notebooks.The end of system mail-in rebates, the start of a great experience. We’ve listened to what … Read More
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Cisco Eyes Major Unbundling
Networking giant Cisco, which has long sold routers, switches, and other network equipment as a bundle of hardware and software, is now looking to unbundle the hardware and software components. In theory, this would allow customers to run Cisco software … Read More
Greater Price Transparency Coming to Medicine
The Kaiser Network sponsored a webinar today called Ask the Experts, Price Transparency, about the drive to make the price of medical care more transparent to consumers. It’s an interesting discussion about something that is vitally important to our lives, … Read More
Dell to Slash Promotions, Rebates
Dell’s big announcement on consumer pricing: reducing promotions by 70-80%. This is a good move for Dell, which had developed a sophisticated, but confusing methodology for offering promotions and rebates that changes several times a day. Buying a computer became … Read More
More on the Tyranny of Averages
Last year, we wrote about The Tyranny of Averages (see our publications page for more). Sometimes, however, Bill Amend describes a concept much more elegantly.
Dell to Announce Major Consumer Pricing Change
Dell has planted the P.R. seeds for an annoucement on Thursday about “a major pricing initative” for the consumer and small business segments. Dell sells mainly to larger enterprises, and their repution for customer service and consumer-friendly pricing has taken … Read More
Is Price Discrimination Good for Buyers?
Buyers tend not to like the term “price discrimination”. After all, “discrimination” in the popular lexicon has more to do with prejudice than discernment. And when it comes to pricing, the term immediately makes people think they are paying higher … Read More
Virgin, BA Tussle as Price Fixing Probe Eyes Airline Fuel Charges
According to the Daily Mail, the current price-fixing probe into fuel surcharges on lucrative transatlantic routes started on a tip from Virgin Airlines, who alerted authorities about attempts by British Airways to bring them into a illegal pricing agreement. BA … Read More
Another Way Not to Price Software
We’ve commented several times on the problems confronting software vendors who have historically priced their products on a per-CPU basis (see posts on Oracle and BEA), as technology has made the very concept of the CPU rather ambiguous. Now the … Read More
Interesting Time-based Promotion
There are two games each evening during the World Cup (at least in Europe– the rest of the world enjoys less prime-time friendly slots). Unfortunately for pubs, there is a gap of about an hour and a half between the … Read More