Regarding Mr. X and American Airlines
After catching wind of the controversy from Daring Fireball, I’ve looked at two of the major opinions in this entire American Airlines and Mr. X debacle.
For those who don’t know what happened, a young designer, Dustin Curtis, wrote a sardonic post about the unintuitive nature of American Airlines’ website and created a mock-up for a better version of their site.
Surprisingly, a member of the American Airlines design team (codenamed Mr. X) actually responded, defending AA rather passionately and described the difficulties of trying to implement change when dealing with issues of huge scale and a sprawling bureaucracy.
An hour after Dustin posted the response, Mr. X was fired.
(more…)
Posted on November 6th, 2009
Filed under: Featured, Marketing by James Wang
A March to Irrelevance
Steve Ballmer speaking at CES 2009.
Source:
JD Lasica
“We don’t believe in coming to market like Apple – high margin, high quality, high price. We believe in high volume and low price,” – Steve Ballmer
Most companies spend millions attempting to promote the first and abolish the second.
Even the poster child of bargain-marketing, Walmart, has been struggling for the past few years to move upmarket with in-house “designer” brands and higher end goods. Cutting costs mean cutting margins. It means living lean—and having no brand loyalty.
If you compete on cost, the moment a cheaper competitor comes along, there goes your market.
But on the low end, Microsoft is not going to outcompete Linux on the low end—and if they do, the Microsoft of now is not going to much like the Microsoft it’ll have to become to do so.
That leaves the mid-market. Which is nothing. (more…)
Posted on September 18th, 2009
Filed under: Featured, Marketing, Science & Tech by James Wang
