‘The consumer is truly king …’
p2pnet news view P2P:- “For the last 30 years, the computer industry has bragged about its achievements. And when the industry was excited about a breakthrough, it expected — even demanded — that consumers get excited, too. But that less-than-symbiotic relationship may be coming to an end. Workers finish a new store in California where Advanced Micro Devices will emphasize what its chips can do, not the chips themselves. A customer at Best Buy in Chicago, where laptops are sold with a card listing specifications that buyers might find confusing. What the industry calls a ‘fact tag’ has been evidence of its hubris. The fact tag sits next to PCs at stores like Best Buy and Fry`s, bewildering one consumer after another. It trumpets things like DDR2 RAM, 5400 r.p.m. hard drives, Turion benchmark scores and the robust L2 cache sizes of Core 2 Duos.
“Once cherished, the fact tag has turned into an object of scorn as PC makers finally reach a realization that many other industries discovered ages ago: the consumer is truly king.”
Goodbye, Gobbledygook – Ashlee Vance – New York Times, September 11, 2009
On Saturday I usually try to do half-a-dozen or so posts, but today it’ll just be briefs. Normal service will be resumed on Monday . Cheers! Jon 
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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
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September 12th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
But those numbers about ram and so on actually quantify differences in performance. Anybody buying a computer is entitled to know the specs before they buy it, after all. If consumers can’t understand the fact tags, that doesn’t mean fact tags are bad. Perhaps stores must go out of their way to educate their consumers on how to compare computer specs. Also, can’t these fact tags be made easier to understand? Who ever writes the tags should consider their audience.
September 12th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
I like the tags. However, I also understand what all that means.
September 12th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Not going to bother to quote …
I’m with normal 100%.
Not much different with the Specs on cars.
I don’t understand them at all, so I find someone who does to help explain them.
September 12th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Yes Normal is correct, but the other side of the coin is……..How many “consumers” (i really hate that term!)
even know what the specs mean. I’m sure us die hard geeks that hang around P2Pnet do, but really, the average person just wants to treat the computer like they do the car, turn the key, it works, horray life is good!
stw
September 12th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
@ NO1UNO
âconsumersâ (i really hate that term!)
It only applies to people who haven’t yet logged on and discovered the communication (and other) possibilities offered by the Great Equaliser (the net
).
People such as you are customers again — free will, free choice – and that frightens the shit out of the cartels.
Their businesses rely totally on making and selling ‘product’ for like brain-dead cash-cows — aka, consumers.
Cheers!
September 12th, 2009 at 9:25 pm
“It only applies to people who havenât yet logged on and discovered the communication (and other) possibilities offered by the Great Equaliser (the net
).”
I know plenty of people who have net accounts and who couldn’t tell you the difference between a hard drive and RAM if their lives depended on it.
October 3rd, 2009 at 6:32 pm
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