4 ms·
Bose was ahead of his time as they sold overpriced products before Apple did. Why this is worth celebrating is questionable.
by OGC 13y ago
Bose was ahead of his time as they sold overpriced products before Apple did. Why this is worth celebrating is questionable.
- onedev 13y agoIf they were overpriced then why did people buy them? Why was the market willing to bear such a price? Clearly people saw some kind of value in the products yes? It's akin to Beats by Dre. People value aesthetics and Beats are the best looking headphones out there so people are willing to pay a premium for that. It's not overpriced if that's the price that people value the product at. It's certainly not inexpensive, and we can have a discussion about the sound quality, but "overpriced" is a term that I think is thrown around too loosely.
- potatolicious 13y agoBecause the market is not a perfectly efficient discriminator of quality. In a more extreme way, why do homeopathic products exist? The real question here is whether customer satisfaction is a fully sufficient criterion to determine whether or not something is a "ripoff". For medical goods the answer is a fairly universal "no". For everything else it's more controversial. Is it correct to shortchange your customers as long as they don't know about it and are happy with their purchase? Are Bose's products actually shortchanging their customers, or is it simply satisfying a different set of priorities? I don't think we'll ever come to anything resembling consensus on the above.
- onedev 13y agoI think it's satisfying a different set of priorities. That's a very good way to put it, now that you mention it. I think Apple fits this category pretty well too.
- niels_olson 13y agoI like the way Warren Buffet explains markets: in the short term, they're a popularity contest. In the long term, they're a weighing machine.
- onedev 13y agoHow would you say the quote explains the context of Bose products?
- mikeash 13y agoWhat exactly is "quality", and in what sense does it exist outside of human perceptions?
- danmaz74 13y agoOverpriced = the mark up of the price over costs is very high. Then, you can think that mark-up pricing isn't a good reference point - or even possible, for non-physical goods - but the meaning of the word in that context is clear.