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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

#211
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got a Nexus S 4G, I'm lucky if I see an update within months of release.

Nexus S will not be getting 4.2 apparently: http://mobilesyrup.com/2012/11/13/android-4-2-being-pushed-t...

I was initially upset about this, but I have to admit the Nexus S is fairly behind what most would consider modern smartphone hardware to be. Single core CPU, no GPU, barely any RAM to speak of, it's no surprise that Android has progressed to the point where it simply could not run well on such a device. Besides that, there is documentation available (though not widely advertised) that states that Nexus devices have an 18 month support lifecycle and the Nexus S hit that back in July.

I'll just have to accept my fate, and pick up a Nexus 4 when I'm able.

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

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Sadly I can't sell you a binding pre-order contract. (That would be where you couldn't cancel your order) And for things like the Nexus 4 (where you might engage in a bit of reselling) you will have people 'pre-order' to get a place in line, only to find when they start shipping that you can't sell them for much of a markup on ebay so they cancel their pre-order. Or like the great disk drive crisis of 2011 where people put multiple orders into multiple distributors only to cancel when one of them filled.

Another thing to consider (and this was true of the Nexus 4 and later updated in the article) the article said they 'sold out' but Google didn't. The authors interpreted not being able to get to a sales page as being 'sold out' but later discovered that there was some order rate management going on where the 'overflow' went to the 'coming soon' page and repeated attempts would eventually get you a page you could order from.

Logistics management is a tricky thing, if you are good at it you can pretty much name your own salary because its trivially easy to 'show' how much you are worth with basic accounting techniques. If the company has the volume you can literally say "If you hire me I'll save you $700,000 a year, I'll actually save you $1,000,000 a year but I'm going to keep $300,000 of it as salary."

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

#214
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…

NO! THEY SHOULD HAVE TAKE MONEY IN PREORDER AND BUILD NEXUS WITH PEOPLE MONEY. NO RISK. NOW THEY DO SAME THING BUT WASTE PEOPLE TIME. GOOGLE NOT SMART PEOPLE.
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