Archive for category Questions
How can a great company like Apple create such a poor value like Mobileme?
Earlier this month, while on vacation of all times, my free year of MobileMe expired. Immediately and without warning my me.com email, which I never used, began spitting errors out every five minutes. My photos were locked and completely inaccessible. Like poor Beloki in the 2003 Tour de France, my online presence was shattered.
Thus the question: is it worth $100 for Apple’s cloud services? I found my “trial” year earned simply by working for AT&T to be pretty informative in the face of said question. MobileMe is roughly equal to Google Sync in terms of basic services rendered: your calendars will sync in real time, contacts will be backed up and synced, and email will have some exchange-like features such as detailed contact information and a different style of pushing.
Essentially, Apple offers two things I like that Google doesn’t: A button within the photo app to automatically send to MobileMe and Find my iPhone, or device GPS tracking. The button, along with the policy of locking you out from your data, is anti-trust-like and cheating, so even if convenient I make it a non-issue in protest and adapt to Picasa via iPhone. Find my iPhone is genuinely valuable, but just not worth $100.
MobileMe is Apple’s worst product by far. Even Apple TV has a decent value proposition in a market where no set top boxes are really fantastic. But the value proposition of a pay-only, walled off service that probably derives an appreciable fraction of its sales from people desperate to recover their data and credit-card-requiring-trial users who forget to cancel, especially with amazing free alternatives available, is nil to me.
Let’s hope the rumors are true and Apple either implements a free level of Me service or just makes it free outright. Personally though, I’ll already be used to Google Sync.
Girl Scouts, controlled by the cookies?
There lay the box of Thin Mints on top of the microwave in the break room. You will be impressed to know that it took over two days for us to give in and devour them after receiving permission from their owner.
But we asked ourselves: how much would this box fetch on the black market in the “off season” of girl scout cookies? Thus began the debate: how much sway do the evil girl scout cookie bakers have over the larger girl scout operation?
Perhaps the entire organization was founded on the premise of being a clever marketing arm of these savvy chefs. Thinking in terms of today’s marketing trends, this would blow twitter away adjusted for industry developments to the 1940s, or whenever the Girl Scouts began.
Alas I have not yet taken it upon myself to self-educate on whatever historical accounts are out there. The way the ruling council so aggressively manipulates the supply and demand piqued my interest and suspicion.
If I worked for a newspaper this scandal would be unearthed in no time. However, for now, I’ll just go to wikipedia.
Why does FF7:AC Blu-ray’s price waver so wildly?
While looking for the best deal on Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete blu-ray I found something very surprising.
Premiums for delivery, instant gratification, and mass market reach are REALLY huge! Take a look:
Amazon.com has it for $21.49. Tax and/or shipping would bring it to around $26 with 4 day shipping.
Borders.com, what I would before have considered to be a competitor of Amazon’s, has it for a whopping $40.99 plus shipping and tax! I guess it must just not have the scale of Amazon.
Walmart.com had the best raw deal for $21.32 plus tax and free shipping to the store. Expecting brick and mortar Wal-mart would probably be different I called to see if it would at least be close. The electronics employee told me they do not sell it. Meanwhile, I found this consumerist article about a guy who tried to get a TV price matched from web to store, or down to $367 from $397.
Wal-mart’s line with him was that it does not compete with itself and local managers are given the authority to tinker with prices.
Anyway, I strolled into Wal-mart to get some cheap-o store-brand staples, one of which was DVD+R’s, and lo and behold there was Advent Children for $29.96.
While this one item’s price’s wildly flailing about is not too surprising it makes me curious: how can this be? At the over 30% premium, how is someone who buys it through Borders getting anything less than wholly ripped off? The lower-priced competitors have the scale, there is a definite price people are willing to pay for instant gratificaiton, and perhaps people just don’t consider the possibility that different retailers would have such discrepancies.
A large part of the real reason probably can be traced to what I chose. Here I am talking about people getting hosed by 30% premiums, yet I bought it at Wal-mart so I could have it for tomorrow. I am perpetuating the evil!