| theshoe23 said: Not putting the 80 gb at 499 would be suicide. In fact, it could make me abandon Sony because they will have officially killed themselves this generation. |
This is a churning process. The idea is that you're not getting enough sales, so you drop the price and shortly there after announce that it is a temporary drop. There is confusion as to whether there is a limited-time PS3 price of $500, and Sony is hoping that people will believe that the PS3 is only available at $500 until stocks run out of the 60GB PS3 (they didn't deny this today -- they just said there's a lot of 60GB PS3). The strategy makes business sense, even though it's deceiptful. Here's what it will accomplish:
(1) People will buy out the 60GB model, making it unnecessary for Sony to further drop the price of a 60GB model to get it to sell
(2) People who are on the fence may buy the PS3 thinking it will not be available for $500 for a while after the 60GB sells out.
People in the know would suspect Sony would still have to drop the price of the 80GB model to well under $500 this year and that there are literally millions of unsold 60GB PS3 units on the model and it will take Sony months and months to sell them. Most likely, there will still be 60GB units available in December even if they're no longer being produced.
It's deceiptful, yes, but if you don't care about your customers it makes good business sense.
jjseth: I think a lot of people are disgusted by Sony's business practices. Which would explain why they want Sony to fail -- they don't want these types of business practices to become the standard and if they are successful, they'll certainly be an interesting blueprint to follow.
