Marketing

Save $, Stay Healthy

This entry was posted in Economics Health Care Marketing on by

Just ignore the antibacterial cleaning products:

A study by Dr. Elaine Larson at the Columbia School of Nursing called into question the usefulness of antibacterial products for the home. In New York, 224 households, each with at least one preschooler, were randomly assigned to two groups. One group used antibacterial cleaning, laundry and hand-washing products. The other used ordinary products.
For 48 weeks, the groups were monitored for seven symptoms of colds, flu and food poisoning – and found to be essentially the same. According to Dr. Gerba’s research, an active adult touches an average of 300 surfaces every 30 minutes. You cannot win at this. You will become obsessive-compulsive. Just wash your hands with soap and water a few times a day, and leave it at that.
Yep, wash your hands and refrigerate spoilable food.

The Long Tail

This entry was posted in Economics Marketing on by

In this post, Should Government Subsidize Mortgages, Tyler Cowen recommends this book for data on credit rationing. So, I hop over to Amazon to evaluate and what do I find: the price is $115 for a 384 page book with an Amazon sales rank of 1,755,070.
In his next post, Making Money From Niche Demand, he recommends, as do I, this article:

on how falling fixed costs (my terminology) will revolutionize the world of culture.
The long tail is the bottom end of the sales power curve which, according to the article, is where outfits like Amazon, Netflix, Rhapsody and iTunes are getting most of their revenue. For Amazon this is books with sales rank of under 130,000.
I might have considered purchasing Tyler’s book if he had been following some of the pricing suggestions in the article, for instance: Cut the Price in half. Now lower it. Sure, they are talking specifically about downloadable content but if you are ranked 1,755,070 following that suggestion just might move you up the rankings a bit and might make you a bit more money.
Update (10/7): Joi Ito has more on this. Also read the comments to his post for why $.99 might be too low, at least for some types of material.

Microsoft, Security and your Pocketbook

This entry was posted in Internet Marketing Microsoft Technology on by

It does not look like Microsoft is taking security as seriously as their cash flow:

Microsoft this week reiterated that it would keep the new version of Microsoft’s IE Web browser available only as part of the recently released Windows XP operating system, Service Pack 2. The upgrade to XP from any previous Windows versions is $99 when ordered from Microsoft. Starting from scratch, the operating system costs $199.
That, analysts say, is a steep price to pay to secure a browser that swept the market as a free, standalone product.
“It’s a problem that people should have to pay for a whole OS upgrade to get a safe browser,” said Michael Cherry, analyst with Directions on Microsoft in Redmond, Wash. “It does look like a certain amount of this is to encourage upgrade to XP.”
This is, though, just the tip of the iceberg. Many of these older systems, 49.2% of the Microsoft OS base, run on machines that can not support XP in a usable form. My family has 3 of these as well as a couple newer machines that have the memory and processor speed to support XP.
So, it is not just a matter of a $99 or $199 OS for the many people who would have to by new hardware to support XP.
But, this is also one reason why I run Firefox and Thunderbird on all our PCs.