In class we mentioned how successful Dell is, Matthew’s blog also shows how Dell reach its success.However, what is happening to Dell now?

On the October 29, Dell CEO Michael Dell and the private equity house Silver Lake complete their buyout for Dell with $24.9 billion. As smartphones and tablet computers are more popular among customers, PC sales declined in the past years. Meanwhile, Dell CEO wants to transform the company into a provider of computing services to corporations to start a new chapter for the company.

It is really a sad story because Dell once was the largest PC company worldwide. Until now, the world is experiencing a new technical impact brought by smartphones and tablet computers. Customers are always tend to buy less expensive product with better service provided. Smartphones and tablet computers are much easier to carry with people and people can use the same applications that are used on computer or even more applications develped especially for smartphones and tablet computers. Dell PC is not capable of competing with smartphones and tablet computers since it is very heavy and large to carry and costs more. As a result, it is doomed to be obsoleted.

Recourse:https://blogs.ubc.ca/matthewanderson/2013/09/29/dell-icious/

The blog below indicates how he thinks Chinese people are crazy about buying gold on the Nation Day. That’s very interesting.

On the National Day, a huge number of people went to Hong Kong to spend their holiday. Meantime, because everything in Hong Kong is duty-free, people enjoyed shopping there. It is said that these days the most crowded place was not shopping mall but the gold stores. People rushed into the store and paid for the gold bars and gold coins without any thoughts and hesitations.

In fact, the price of gold still continues going down this month despite the United States government entered a shutdown on the October 1st. It was anticipated to go up because the United States government is now facing many big problems.

Using the microeconomics concepts, we know that price can affect quantity demanded. It turns out that the price of gold continues going down so that the quantity demanded by people greatly increased. Gold is a good example of price and demand.This is why people are crazy about “robbing ” gold.

Recourse：http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4df087300101bhex.html

Ali’s blog “Get ready for the iphone5s or iphone5c” indicates how she thinks about the products. I want to discuss it as well.

iPhone 5S/5C launched on the 20^th of September and all the apple fans were crazy about how to get a new iPhone at the first moment. But in fact, it was very hard to buy a shiny new iPhone 5S on the launch day because apple only offered a few iPhone 5S products. The most popular color for iPhone 5S is gold. It is said that these days the price of gold iPhones can reach to 10,000 dollars or even higher. No matter how high the price is, people still bid a even higher price to buy it. But at the same time, its sister phone iPhone 5C could be pre-ordered online on the 17^th of September and also could be bought on the launch day without any shortages.

Why this happened?

This is called “hunger marketing”. Apple reduces the production of iPhone 5S in order to create an illusion that there is a shortage of the apple iPhone 5S. From the microeconomics, shortage of the products will increase the price of the products and the corporations will gain high profit from while maintaining the high price. This strategy also adds brand value to the corporations. That’s one way that apple attracts more customers and make more profits.

Recource:https://blogs.ubc.ca/dengali/2013/09/27/get-ready-for-the-iphone5s-or-iphone5c/

The United States federal government entered a shutdown on the first of October because the government fail to enact a continuing resolution for the 2014 fiscal year. Over 800,000 people would be furloughed without pay. It is estimated that the shutdown will reduce 0.3% of the economic growth of the United States economy in the fourth quarter.

The shutdown causes serious problems. Many tourist attractions are forced to close, including Yellowstone National Park, Statue of Liberty. For example, October 1st is Chinese Nation Day and Chinese people all have a 7-day holiday. Many of them supposed to have a good time travelling to America. Now, they have to change their schedule because these tourist attractions are all closed. Meantime, the shutdown also leads to economic loss on the whole tourism industry. If this continues, some tourist cities may even break.

The shutdown also affect American’s life. IPhone 5S/5C have launched already and many apple fans are going to buy it. Since there are lots of people in the line, some federal employees who are not paid by the government earn their money by standing in the line and buying iPhones for those people do not have enough patient to wait.