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Is Nike so far ahead of every other shoe manufacturer? What's the margin on a pair of Nikes? How many young kids waste family money on a brand who makes the sho

Is Nike so far ahead of every other shoe manufacturer? What's the margin on a pair of Nikes? How many young kids waste family money on a brand who makes the shoes for a fraction in Southeast Asia. How about Christian Louboutain? There's also the sunk cost for many people. If you've bought tons of content in the App Store, you'd have to rebuy everything if you switched to another ecosystem. For the same reason, if you own proprietary camera lens for Camera Body A, you are not likely to dump all your photo equipment even if a Camera Body B comes out that is cheaper and better. Path dependency. We learned this lesson once with the Wintel duopoly. Then with the Web, from about 1994 to 2007, we had broke the shackles. And now, people are happy to enslave themselves again, and vigorously defend their servitude. Apple makes great hardware and software. They don't need this.

lostgame 6y ago
>> Is Nike so far ahead of every other shoe manufacturer? From personal experience, yes. Easily. It's like comparing a Wal-Mart 'First Act' electric guitar to a Fender Stratocaster, or one of those awful Crosley turntables to a pair of Technics SL-1200s. I have particularly sensitive feet, and ride a push scooter everywhere so cheap soles will wear quickly. I'll go through 4 pairs of $30 knockoff shoes a year instead of buying a pair of Nikes for $100 and enjoying them for three or more years. I live in Toronto and make my pilgramage to the actual Nike retail outlet in the Eaton's centre once a year to see what's new, try things on, and buy just one pair of shoes between $100-200. As a result, my closet is full of stylish, comfortable shoes that have lasted years and years. :) YMMV, but honestly the same goes for Apple for me. I'm still using a G5 tower from 2005 with 16GB RAM and 2x1TB SSD's on the daily. I paid a couple grand for that back in the day (with about 4GB RAM originally and a 120GB HDD, I believe)...I don't have a single PC tower or laptop left except a hackintoshed Lenovo that's only a couple years old, despite buying a bunch. Nike is not 'so far ahead' of every other shoe manufacturer, but, similar to Apple, they are only comparable in any way to similarly-priced manufacturers of their tier - Adidas, Reebok, or Microsoft Surface, Alienware. The Surface is probably the only portable I've had the pleasure to use that is comparable to the build quality and feel of Apple's manufacturing. Gucci, for example; is a company that represents true excess for the sake of excess. (What's that Lil' Pump line? 'Spent 10k on my Gucci bed sheets'?) As an iOS dev for a living, I think the 30% is bullshit. But from what I've read/heard, it's based off something similar to retail margins.
- cromwellian 6y ago
  Retailers have physical real estate that is a limited resource. They have to have logistics and shelf stocking. The marginal cost is that is non-trivial compared to maintaining a large database of apps which is almost but not quite zero. The retail analogy is bogus. Software isn't a physical product these days.

lostgame 6y ago

>> Is Nike so far ahead of every other shoe manufacturer? From personal experience, yes. Easily. It's like comparing a Wal-Mart 'First Act' electric guitar to a Fender Stratocaster, or one of those awful Crosley turntables to a pair of Technics SL-1200s. I have particularly sensitive feet, and ride a push scooter everywhere so cheap soles will wear quickly. I'll go through 4 pairs of $30 knockoff shoes a year instead of buying a pair of Nikes for $100 and enjoying them for three or more years. I live in Toronto and make my pilgramage to the actual Nike retail outlet in the Eaton's centre once a year to see what's new, try things on, and buy just one pair of shoes between $100-200. As a result, my closet is full of stylish, comfortable shoes that have lasted years and years. :) YMMV, but honestly the same goes for Apple for me. I'm still using a G5 tower from 2005 with 16GB RAM and 2x1TB SSD's on the daily. I paid a couple grand for that back in the day (with about 4GB RAM originally and a 120GB HDD, I believe)...I don't have a single PC tower or laptop left except a hackintoshed Lenovo that's only a couple years old, despite buying a bunch. Nike is not 'so far ahead' of every other shoe manufacturer, but, similar to Apple, they are only comparable in any way to similarly-priced manufacturers of their tier - Adidas, Reebok, or Microsoft Surface, Alienware. The Surface is probably the only portable I've had the pleasure to use that is comparable to the build quality and feel of Apple's manufacturing. Gucci, for example; is a company that represents true excess for the sake of excess. (What's that Lil' Pump line? 'Spent 10k on my Gucci bed sheets'?) As an iOS dev for a living, I think the 30% is bullshit. But from what I've read/heard, it's based off something similar to retail margins.

cromwellian 6y ago
Retailers have physical real estate that is a limited resource. They have to have logistics and shelf stocking. The marginal cost is that is non-trivial compared to maintaining a large database of apps which is almost but not quite zero. The retail analogy is bogus. Software isn't a physical product these days.