Aug
21
Daring Fireball: (1) Collect Underpants, (2) ?, (3) Profit
John Gruber describes the mistaken thinking of people now saying “HP should’ve always sold the TouchPad at a fire sale price, they’d have sold loads and been successful”.
I wonder if this kind of thinking is the result of a VC-funded, low-overhead web-service mindset, where it is arguably possible to put growth ahead of profitability in the short term? And now tech cheerleaders/pundits are trying to look at hardware and atoms businesses through the same prism.
As Gruber says at the end of his piece, “sustainable businesses are built on profit”. And that requires pricing based on margins and cost per unit, not just user acquisition targets.
