I just love it how everyone complains and moans about price fixing, how everyone is in on this "revelation", and yet nobody (neither people nor government control agencies) are doing jack **** about it. Apparently ensuring that Firefox doesnt lose another precious 9 million downloads to IE is more important issue to some...
Well, the first obstacle in the path of doing "something about price fixing", is being able to prove it.
Proving that Firefox has more or less downloads than times past, or is losing downloads to other browsers, is a far easier thing about which to round up the statistics. But, I disagree that it's unimportant.
Firefox losing ground, is emblematic of Google ramming "Chrome" down peoples throats, almost to the point of installing it via drive by downloads. An-ndddd......the topic for another thread.
So, I agree with you in premise, but I think you made a rather unfortunate, "apples vs. oranges" comparison, as a choice of vehicle for your conclusion.
In a broader sense, societies and people today in general, are fixating on miniscule, superficial, and inconsequential things and details, as a general and widespread rule, rather than an exception.
Anyway, to the people arguing about the research and development expenses of the companies - I do know about that, and I also know that before the floods the HDs were making a very small profit margin for the above mentioned companies. But thats not the point. The point is that they put themselves into that situation, by massively overproducing the supply and lowering prices to a point where they backed themselves into a corner, noticed that they werent making enough money out of the consumers, and had to find someone to blame to justify the transfer of their need for higher profits directly on the consumer. The flood was that magic someone (force of nature and all that, what can you do, sigh).
How could "R & D" costs, have possibly worked their way into this thread?
You could almost draw the conclusion the "the great flood", was good for business, since it served to mask other overarching issues such as buyouts and mergers, which have to be engineered to stifle competition and inflate prices. It always infuriates me when one company starts poor mouthing that they're losing business to another company. It often turns out both companies are part of the same conglomerate. So.., as it sometimes turns out, the money has simply been put into another pocket of the same suit..
The retailers of course were only glad to jump on that bandwagon (NewEgg in particular took advantage of the panic and raised prices on some HDs 3.5 times in time for Thanksgiving and Christmas, I wonder how much they made off the public ignorant in the matter), and an argument can be made they the worst offenders were not really the companies but the retailers. I read the reports, and while the companies did exaggerate the amount of damage and supply issues - the drop in production wasnt that massive, and what drop was there, was mostly restored in 3 month, not a year like they say - but the fact is that there was never a sudden critical lack of harddrives, there was in fact an overstock of them just before the floods, and the ones benefiting on this the most were the shops selling their large stock purchased at prior price levels at 2-3x their base cost. The companies did make money on this too, but it wasnt a massive exploit like everyone likes to think.
I'd like to think that the public outcry and reaction would have been a lot better if it wasnt for the behavior of the retail stores in the immediate few months after the floods, most people would have been able to understand 25-40% base cost increase by the manufacturers if the retailers didnt attempt to make an extra buck for themselves on top of that. But thats just me.
I share your sentiments. I have a hard time getting my head around whether or not there's an actual difference between, "the law of supply and demand", and, "price gouging". It seems to me, if there is a difference, it's so the price gouging is just enough to pass for supply and demand, and you have seeded enough cash to bribe members of congress to declare it, "supply and demand".
As for retailers raising the price on items of old stock on hand, to reflect the profit margin they'd like to maintain on new stock with a higher purchase cost, um not exactly front page news. Gosh, then there's the old trick of not supplying commissioned sales people with the actual dealer cost. Any promotions, free merchandise, or discounts for large volume, very often aren't reflected in the sales person's cost sheet.
Produced by an unusually ruthless monsoon season, the catastrophic floods were estimated to cost the country over $45 billion in damages. A whopping 65 of the country's 72 provinces were declared flood disaster zones. With the world's two largest drive manufacturers so heavily reliant on Thai production, Western Digital and Seagate, it was just a matter of time before prices sky rocketed -- and that they did, with some models hitting triple their original price.
