Literature Review of 5 articles
Based on secondary research of articles that our group had conducted, it led us to the problem statement that quality does not meet price. We accumulated five significant articles and utilized its information in order to generate the problem statement. What we noticed is that there were a lot of articles regarding quality issues related to Sony laptops. This made us question the high prices of Sony's offerings.
The first article, entitled “Sony shares drop after VAIO recall," from the New York Times talked about the consequence of the 438,000 units of VAIO TZ laptops that were recalled last year. Among 200 cases worldwide, 70 incidents of overheating were reported, which was caused by faulty wiring (Izumi, 2008). According to the article, the effect of the recalls had resulted in Sony shares to fall by 4.2 percent. The next article mentioned that Sony is no stranger to the laptop recalls because of the laptop battery recall back in 2008 (Null, 2008). This article questioned the reliability of Sony laptops.
On the other hand, another article talked about a graphic chip in some of the Sony VAIO laptops that may fail, due to the NVDIA chip being faulty and overheating (Pert, 2009). Though this article only informs readers of the failure of the chip installed by Sony, the next article our group found acknowledged the graphic issues related to the NVIDIA chip. The potential defective graphics chips were believed to be built into 14 Sony VAIO laptop models and could cause display issues, video distortion, blank screen, and other uncharacteristic graphic related issues (My Digital Life, 2009).
Finally, the last article we collected discussed the overprici...
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...nna doesn’t know much about computers and she says she only uses her laptop for school and the internet (Joanna, Personal Interview, February 2010).
Another response I found surprising with a participant that owns a Sony was with Patrick. He said that Sony laptops give back what you pay for and despite the recalls, he would still go with Sony (Patrick, Personal Interview, March 2010). He believes that every laptop become difficult at some point. Although Patrick has only had his Sony VAIO for about a year, he has already been experiencing some minor issues, such as, the fan being too loud, the speed getting slower, and the battery life getting worse. But even though, Patrick said that it is comforting to know that a top consumer electronics brand such as Sony has reliable customer services to tackle those issues (Patrick, Personal Interview, March 2010).
...design are lower than other competitor’s. For example, they have ultra fast computing power but our brand just has high speed computing power. Thence, some competitors which Workhorse chose their product are just they want and need.
We’ve all read about companies who’ve suffered hiccups in product quality or service. Some have survived; some have not.
Since BPS couldn't expect a competing product like 1270, both the company and the distributor were shocked and stirred. Considering Barco's scale in the market, even though BPS was in the position of industry leader, it couldn't defend itself from the attack of the giant like Sony. At this point, to keep the market position and share BPS should take an immediate action against Sony's market conquering movement with the high-quality but low-priced projector 1270. At this time, the managers of Barco were considering basically two options: pricing option and product development option, but both options had some defects.
Four people decided on buying computers from Dell Corp because they had read that these computers contained Pentium 4 microprocessors which makes them faster and way more powerful than other computers. Since Dell had advertised this they decided to buy the computers but
observational cross-sectional study, studies data from a population, of patients in a hospital in Portugal (patients who were under psychiatric treatment, excluding those who were admitted to the hospital within six months/put on drug therapy to lose weight) (Correia & Ravasco, n.d., 2014)
There are many products that are released to the public that are not thoroughly tested. These products get tested like any other products, but they just don’t get tweaked and changed enough to be the best that they can be. This situation can be the result of the testing company not having enough knowledge of the product or poor diversity of the test groups or target audience. An example of a product not tested enough is the Microsoft Xbox. The Xbox, a game console released on November of 2001, marked Microsoft’s official entry in the gaming industry. Immediately after the release, users stated the Xbox was rushed into production and wasn’t properly tested. However, articles titled, “CES 2001: Microsoft Discusses the Announcement” and “Xbox Product Testing Initiated,” both...
Sony’s claim on the ten year lifespan only covered the physical device and not the features included. They stated in their counter argument that the promise they made did not act as an expressed warranty since their terms of services and license agreement expressly stated that updates may cause some loss of functionality.
BestBuy really needs to know the expectations of consumers to be able to align on the same distribution line than its competitors that continue to cut its market shares by offering the same products at very competitive prices. There is no doubt about the threat that may represent specially Wal-Mart for BestBuy, its "Every day low price" slogan speaks for itself. Today, quality’s problem is used as a marketing argument, but it’s not over true even though Walmart some low quality products. We have to notice that most of the producers of nowadays ’technologies are Asian countries as proof, IPhone and well-known brands technologies have always been manufactured in China. So the quality problem is not really the problem BestBuy is facing because there is no doubt that Wal-Mart and BestBuy have the same suppliers since everyone claims to offer high quality electronics. The first thing to do is to figure out how Walmart makes the difference by lowing its fixed and variables costs to better maximize profit even though offering low cost product. I think BestBuy needs to review its employees ‘training budget since they already have a good knowledge about the product they offer. As cited on page 22-4, even though its revenue grow, at the same time its net income and operating
That creates an incentive to manufacture products with built-in obsolescence. As C.W. Nevius points out in an article for SFGate, fix-it guys are rapidly disappearing. Why pay to have an appliance repaired when it wouldn't cost much more to buy a new one? Many small appliances like toasters and microwaves have become throw-away
Dell is one of the renowned companies in the world. If someone is asked to name the companies, which sell computers, he/she will definitely include the name of Dell (Martin 2002). In fact, it is widely accepted brand in the world. However, with the arrival of rival companies, post 2007, for Dell, it was testing to stay alive in the race in the computer industry. Dell in effect is acknowledged by some experts as one of the vulnerable brands. Hence, it would be preemptive for the corporation to continue to exist in the contest, where big companies, such as Apple and Acer have dominated the market by this
On November 24, Sony released the PlayStation 3, kicking off the latest round in the video game console wars. But this is not like the battles of the past for Sony, whose annual revenue now hinges on outselling rivals Nintendo and Microsoft. Sony doesn't seem to realize the situation it's created for itself, gambling its gaming business on a strategy that will alienate the very public that made earlier PlayStations undisputed leaders for the last decade.
Historically the personal computer (PC) industry has sold its products at reasonably high prices yet garnered only small profit margins. One reason for this is the high competition in the PC industry which led to competitive pricing among producers. Analyzing the competitive environment of the PC industry, it is evident that there is very little barrier to entry in this market. PC's have very low physical uniqueness and are made of standard components that require very little expertise to assemble.
Sony’s problems continued and were ‘most obvious in its core electronics business, which accounts for two-thirds of its revenues’ as the consumer devices such as TV’s, DVD players and music players came under fierce price pressure and Sony failed to come up with any more trend-setting new gadgets to boost profits (The Economist, 2005). Idei resigned after a series of stumbles and handed the reins to Welsh-born American Howard Stringer, a former television executive (Dvorak, 2005, p.1). Prior to joining Sony, Mr. Stringer had a distinguished 30-year career as a journalist, producer and executive at CBS Inc (www.sony.net).
The principal marketing position of Lenovo Group primarily taking into account these three marketing positioning methods: high-end, middle and high-end combination. Middle and high-end positioning does not merely ensure the consistency of Lenovo Corporation’s orientation in the marketplace, but also constantly improve the image and status in the eyes of customers. Although the IT business’s margins decrease, choosing high-end positioning will be likely to hold benefits for competitive market position in a long run (Gan,2002,P27). In general, the high-end’s commodities’ sale margins are twice or thrice the number of sales in low-end goods. Besides, low-end goods have no warranty of margins in the growth of cost condition, so taking the high-end way is crucial to the corporation’s profits.
Smith, PHD (an associate professor of economics at the Graziadio School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University), 6% of data losses is the result of software corruption and 40% is due to hardware failure. So what does this have to do with using up-to-date technology? Choosing to save money today by using unsupported software and outdated hardware are primary reasons for software corruption and hardware failure. Even more, there’s nothing more frustrating than losing data or having a hardware failure that brings employees to a grinding halt and negatively impacts