Editorials

In business it is often said that you need to have a thick skin to survive.  Now that may be true when you are dealing with vendors, manufacturers and even consumers but for your products sometimes thin is better.  We had the chance to talk to Troy Rutt at True Power about their new ThinSkin product for the iPhone 4.

William Shakespeare once wrote, “A Rose by any other name would smell just as sweet”.  Now this is a very true statement but it does not apply to marketing and the human perception of brand recognition. The global PR machine has done such an excellent job of making the brand the thing we buy that shifts in name or logos can have massive impacts on the way we purchase things. Let me give you a funny example; Back when it was first released the Chevy Nova was considered a market success in the US. People were buying it at an acceptable rate and of course Chevy was making money. Then they tried to market it to South America. It failed and I mean epic failed. The reason for this fail? The name; you see in Spanish (and its derivatives) Nova sounds like the phrase “No Va” which is apparently short for “No Go” as you can imagine that name killed the sales rather nicely.  Now car manufacturers make sure their product names are acceptable in the countries they plan to sell them in far in advance.

Have you ever wondered how Apple does it? I mean how they really get the best information. Those low prices and just seem to be on top of things so well. Many have said that Steve Jobs just has his finger on the pulse of today’s computer consumers.  Now, I will grant that Steve is a marketing genius but there has to be something else. One of these things was the former inclusion of Google CEO Eric Schmidt on Apple’s board (until an obvious conflict of interest came up) this gave Apple some amazing information into consumer wants and trends (after all Google is in the business of selling ads and collects a ton of data for this purpose).  But we have always had a feeling that there was something else going on behind the scenes.

Recently there was an announcement that Intel is pulling out of WiMax in Taiwan.  Now, this is pretty big news as Intel was one of the major proponents of WiMax and was in alliance with more than a few companies to see this project to its completion. The Taiwanese are not happy about this and are now there are rumblings that they are thinking of heading over to ARM to help them complete what they started. But those are just rumors at this stage of the game. After all Intel has not said they will not live up to their side of the deal ($500 Million towards building a WiMax network) they have only closed their offices in Taiwan. There are, however, indications that they are indeed getting ready to drop WiMax. Less than a month ago they released Clearwire from their exclusivity agreement. This agreement would have kept Clearwire tethered to WiMax until 2011. This is good news really as it now allows Clearwire (the provider of 4G service to Sprint in the US) to look into other options for rolling out their 4G service.
But why would Intel do this? The answer is an easy one; the recent settlement with the FTC. In fact if you look back at this one the writing has been on the wall for some time.