man playbooks are cheap now

[geForce]

As it stands now, they are the #2 tablet in the market right now in terms of # of units out there.

[nature boy]

really? haha i guess that ceo was stupid for pulling the plug on them.

[geForce]

It doesn't mean they made money on the Touchpads. They probably lost money.

[geForce]

The funny thing about the Playbooks, before the price drop, we couldn't pay someone to take them and we had tons in stock. Now that the price dropped, people will kill their own dog if it got them some more stock.

[nature boy]

they probably made money on the actual production but lost in the way of r&d. but the point is that now there are all these touchpads out there, and they could have made money on peripherals and software and such.

[nature boy]

i'd imagine that price point is a huge factor. that's rim's game right now, although those who bought at full price are a little pissed off, there are others who are jumping onboard with rim and wanting more in the way of apps.

demand is everything so it seems. apple played that card really well (the "which ipod are you" gave people the sense that they HAD to get an ipod), and i think rim is trying it too but with a different strategy (dropping price instead of clever advertising).

[geForce]

That was my point.. price of course was the determining factor.

This new price drop isn't a strategy to get more market share. It's a desperation move. RIM over-forecasted the demand, so there was way too much stock on hand to the point where so many stores wanted to return stock back to RIM, but RIM couldn't take it back due to the sheer volume.

[nature boy]

really? you know that for a fact?
it seems to me that doesn't seem accurate as like you said, everyone is sold out and demanding for more. that happened during the last sale when i got mine, so why would they do it again?

[geForce]

I'm not 100% sure about my theory, but I'm more sure about the strategy theory not being the case.

When you were buying it cheap that time the price dropped, it was a limited time offer. The stock was only being sold out locally because there was a spike in demand for those few days it was on sale. That sale didn't put much of a dent in the overall stock that was available in NA.

I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to share about the stock situation here at my work, but just trust me when I tell you there was too much stock.

[nature boy]

they're sold out now too. i have friends who are waiting for their back orders.

when i got mine, i got one of the last ones in the area. there could have been more in warehouses around, but they sure weren't getting to store level.

but i guess now that they've dropped the price even more (another $100 off), maybe there is a point to your theory. i came up with my theory from reading the crackberry forums and seeing how rim has been doing other things. they're not folding like hp did, they're still pushing out products like crazy (apparently they released 20 different phones since 2009... which i found hard to believe). and they wouldn't have acquired qnx and pushing out playbook os2 if they were thinking about folding.

[geForce]

No, I never thought they were going to fold like HP did. Just that they were super desperate to get rid of their surplus of stock.

[nature boy]

perhaps it's just a little of column a and a little of column b then haha.

[joel]

hp has a lot of other aspects to their business besides the mobile hardware platform. they've decide to focus on other aspects of their business. RIM's primary business is mobile hardware, if they folded that they wouldn't really have anything left.

[nature boy]

yeah, that's what everyone's saying they'd do. actually fold completely because they can't compete with apple (like most other platforms).

[Duncan]

lol... i rag on bb mostly because i know you like them... it's not so much that i don't like them or i don't think they're good products, i just think it's fun to trash on it and watch you defend it haha

that being said, they doomed themselves to fail the moment they made functionality of the tablet limited if you didn't pair it to your bb phone... that's just stupid imo and that's why i think the playbook is lame...