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Google's Nexus 4 smartphone sells out in the US in 50 minutes

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Re: Google's Nexus 4 smartphone sells out in the US in 50 minutes

#181

Post by peeters »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #50
gergles wrote: post #24

The fact that it is 2012 and stores still refuse to just let you give them money and then have them ship you a product is ridiculous. I don't want to sit here and wait for a store to open or for things to come 'back in stock' to buy a phone. That's why we invented computers, to automate boring tasks. I give you money, you put my name on a list, as phones come in, you ship them in the order of the names on the list. P…

There are laws in the US which require you to ship a product within a certain time or offer a refund. I agree that the 'sold out' buzz is a popular marketing technique, its one of the persuasion tools that works well, scarcity, but I think that is a side effect here. So take a moment and imagine you are in the product manager's shoes at Google and you're tasked with forecasting how many Nexus 4's will be needed. If y…

It's a false dichotomy that you present. Let me preorder the phone. You have the money up front, and have an absolute lower bound on opening day stock.

The fact of the matter is that if the Nexus 4 sold out in less than an hour, then they must not have even had stock to sell to the people that signed up for "notification".

Re: Google's Nexus 4 smartphone sells out in the US in 50 minutes

#182

Post by fatbat »

The whole launch seems very poorly thought out. Or am I missing the genius of it?

* no official launch time.

* no early email notifications went out.

* no sense of stock availability.

* high phone limit (5) per user.

* constant site errors.

* constant checkout errors.

* HSPA+ feature typo.

Re: Google's Nexus 4 smartphone sells out in the US in 50 minutes

#183

Post by plaguuuuuu »

vijayr wrote: post #138
gergles wrote: post #24

The fact that it is 2012 and stores still refuse to just let you give them money and then have them ship you a product is ridiculous. I don't want to sit here and wait for a store to open or for things to come 'back in stock' to buy a phone. That's why we invented computers, to automate boring tasks. I give you money, you put my name on a list, as phones come in, you ship them in the order of the names on the list. P…

Well, it is actually almost 2013 :P On a serious note, I think this is more of a marketing gimmick than a tech issue. Also like having very limited quantities and proclaiming "we're sold out". Not saying that is the case here though.

I think so too. AFAIK Google's computing infrastructure is such that if performance issues arise on anything critical enough they just can shove more and more servers and bandwidth into the mix and expand capacity elastically

Plus it's amazing marketing to be "selling out" of your product.

Re: Google's Nexus 4 smartphone sells out in the US in 50 minutes

#184

Post by fudged71 »

wmf wrote: post #75
thechut wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! Google just recently saw this happen with the Nexus 7 this summer. People were charged when they preordered and then the lack of a hard ship date caused Google to have to spend countless hours in customer support. Once somebody has paid you, the can of worms is open. They could also want to control the amount of unearned revenue on their books.

The concept of "we charge your card when the product ships" was invented how many years ago? It sounds like Google is retrofitting physical products into a store that was never meant to handle them.

A backlog of orders pushes back your shipping date by two months. One random day you get an email saying "Your item has shipped and your card has been charged". Is it not plausible that you've found an alternate in the meantime? Or that your financial situation has changed?

Re: Google's Nexus 4 smartphone sells out in the US in 50 minutes

#185

Post by roger_padactor »

What grinds my gears is that I had it in the cart and processing 4 times and still didn't get it. I find out 2 hours later people were still currently buying it even after it kept showing me the "notify me" button. Oh well I guess I'll wait even longer.

Re: Google's Nexus 4 smartphone sells out in the US in 50 minutes

#186

Post by fusiongyro »

gergles wrote: post #24

The fact that it is 2012 and stores still refuse to just let you give them money and then have them ship you a product is ridiculous. I don't want to sit here and wait for a store to open or for things to come 'back in stock' to buy a phone. That's why we invented computers, to automate boring tasks. I give you money, you put my name on a list, as phones come in, you ship them in the order of the names on the list. P…

I bought my iPhone through AT&T this way. It took a month to show up. There are usually avenues to do this, but people apparently would rather gamble on a phone today than have a sure thing in a month.

Re: Google's Nexus 4 smartphone sells out in the US in 50 minutes

#187

Post by yen223 »

zmonkeyz wrote: post #167
mgkimsal wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xoom and Touchpad were 'new' products (new to that brand) - Nexus isn't 'new' by any stretch. It's got a track record. They have customers they can survey. Hell, it's google - if they can't predict public and customer sentiment and willingness to buy, who can?

But now they have a lot of people bitching about how the phone doesn't have LTE so it's not like it was known it'd be a total slam dunk. I'm a T-Mobile customer in the US though so i don't worry about stuff like that. ;)

I'm more worried about the fact that they only have up to 16GB storage, for an Android phone that doesn't support removable storage.

I mean, even the iPhone 4 has 32GB!

Re: Google's Nexus 4 smartphone sells out in the US in 50 minutes

#188

Post by Groxx »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #50
gergles wrote: post #24

The fact that it is 2012 and stores still refuse to just let you give them money and then have them ship you a product is ridiculous. I don't want to sit here and wait for a store to open or for things to come 'back in stock' to buy a phone. That's why we invented computers, to automate boring tasks. I give you money, you put my name on a list, as phones come in, you ship them in the order of the names on the list. P…

There are laws in the US which require you to ship a product within a certain time or offer a refund. I agree that the 'sold out' buzz is a popular marketing technique, its one of the persuasion tools that works well, scarcity, but I think that is a side effect here. So take a moment and imagine you are in the product manager's shoes at Google and you're tasked with forecasting how many Nexus 4's will be needed. If y…

How does this work with preorders? Seems like that might be a way around it (unless all big-company preorders fit within this window, and smaller ones don't care, and I've never noticed).

Re: Google's Nexus 4 smartphone sells out in the US in 50 minutes

#189

Post by lallysingh »

Zikes wrote: post #90
lallysingh wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can always download android and build/flash it yourself. The Nexus S 4g has downloads for binary drivers through Android 4.1.2, the rest is the regular source download.

I'm fairly well-versed regarding ROMs, and actually ran CM and MIUI on it for quite a while with decent results, but that's not really the point. Nexus is supposed to mean "first in line for OTA updates", not "wait for us to put it on AOSP and then build and flash it yourself, or wait for a modder to make a decent ROM". That is absolutely not the brand I thought I was buying. Edit: Sorry, that was a ruder tone than I…

The tone's fine, it's not a great response to your frustrations. Carriers and phone vendors see additional support costs for no benefit. At the very least, Nexus does mean that you can get everything you need to build an image from Google directly.
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