Monday, January 14, 2002

This story at /. got me thinking. I think I read this example in Positioning -- once upon a time, Coke had no significant competition.   One of their trademarks was famous shape of their bottle.  While I'm sure it helped recognition of their product, it also required a significant investment on their part -- in bottle factories, in bottles (which were often reused), etc.   Pepsi found their opening in this:   They rose to challenge Coke during the depression by offering bottles twice as large as Coke's for the same price.   This was trouble for Coke, because to compete, they had to lower the price of their bottles -- meaning they were either going to spend more money moving and maintain glass bottles than or they were going to have to ditch their current inventory of bottles in favor of larger versions of their trademark bottles.    Or at least that's what I remember of the story. I have to wonder if Apple isn't trying something similar with the new iMac -- in order for a PC maker to acheive that type of footprint, they'd have to abandon much of what makes the PC architecture cost effective -- the modular design of everything from cases to motherboards to expansion cards, and so on.   If consumers go for it and the PC makers chase Apple, they just might be on to something... 10:05:16 PM

Grok to UnSpun: The Real Story.  [Wired News]  I used to love this newsletter.   Hope its as good as it used to be... 10:02:28 PM

[Scripting News] Script of the Day (For Chris Pirillo): <%xml.rss.viewRssBox ("http://radio.weblogs.com/0001015/categories/radioUserland/rss.xml", boxTitle:"Radio News", width:50, frameColor:"#000000", titleBarTextColor:"#000000", titleBarColor:"#F5F5F5", boxFillColor:"#FFFFFF", timeZone:"PST", maxitems:10)%> Demo.  9:39:47 PM