Month: November 2012

(Reply on external blog post: http://blogs.ft.com/businessblog/2012/10/pricing-the-apple-ipad-mini-ask-steve/#axzz2CAC3I0tD)

IPad Mini is out in the market and creates controversy. It is a bigger size of iPhone and a smaller size of iPad. The internal system and most of the external appearance have no significant change. Some Apple fans still buy it but many rational customers are criticizing the products.

Andrew Hill made two very good points in his blog. First, he states that Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, did not focus on the profit but the quality of the products. Steve Jobs would rather keep the price low to gain more market share. However, the Apply without Steve Jobs now sets a relatively high price for iPad mini. Higher price naturally leads to lower demand, on the other hand, the product doesn’t reach people’s expectation.

The second point Andrew made is about the culture of the company. Apple is famous for it revolution. iPod, iPhone and iPad brought revolution to the mp3, cell phone and the PC industry. One main culture and characteristic of Apple is innovation. However, the iPad Mini disappoints everyone. Its appearance does not match the company strategy. Or we can say, it makes no sense to be in the market, since it didn’t bring any revolution.

(Reply on Shuang’s post https://blogs.ubc.ca/shuangliu/2012/10/08/there-is-an-urgent-need-to-accelerate-investment-in-india/#content)

In Shuang’s post, she stated clearly what inflation is and gave examples how government acts help fight the inflation. There are usually two ways to help fighting inflation, the fiscal policy and the monetary policy. The former one is government actions, and the later one is the policy related to the money and interest rate. I agree with Shuang, though the market is fluctuated and will finally adjusted by itself, it takes time. Sometime policies involvement is not an bad idea.

Here in the article, India’s GDP growth is decreasing and misses the expectation. Facing the terrible economy, the policy they choose is the fiscal policy. Obviously the government want to help with it.

“The government’s policy changes began with a 14 percent increase in diesel prices announced on Sept. 13 to restrain expenditure on compensation for below-cost sales. The administration also said it will pare the supply of subsidized cooking gas.”

In this situation, government give subsidies to the victims who are suffering the inflation. The subsidies create the deficit of the government budget. The IMF suggests the government to reform the structure “includes tax and spending reforms, in particular, reducing or eliminating subsidies, while protecting the poor.”

In my opinion, fiscal policy is good, but each coin has two sides. While it is helping boosting the economy, it creates some other problems such as the deficit. Instead of remaining the monetary policy unchanged, use appropriate monetary policies can also balance the economy.

Recently the project of Comm 292 is going on. The project is about BC Hydro Smart Meter Program. Due to the requirement, I researched many articles about the program. One of them, which grabbed my attention, called How smart is the Smart Metering Implementation Programme. It is interesting because it combines concepts in both Comm 101 and 292 class. The article talks about the IT part of the Smart Meting Implementation Programme. This is also the program which supports Janice’s (the CEO of Energy Aware) business. The Programme is an large -scale project that is proceeding in many countries.

Installing the smart meter, the government claims, can help the environment and lower the cost of energy. Customers can also save money on using energy. However, the programme requires big amount of IT management since a massive amounts of data will be collected and analyzed. According to the class,20-70% of IT system are wasted and less than 8% are value. The statistic shows that developing a valuable IT system is complicated and might cost more than the saved. In the article, “The NHS NPfIT, for instance, was initially estimated to cost about £2.3bn over three years, but later extended to £12.4bn over 10 years. Commentators have said it would probably have cost £20bn to complete.” Due to all the fact, no wonder people start criticizing and distrusting the programme and the government.

http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/How-smart-is-the-Smart-Metering-project

(Feedback  of class)

On November 8th, we had a special 101 class. Neither Jeff nor Paul were the speaker, but two of the Sauder graduated students. Janice Cheam’s presentation impressed me, not only because I am now doing a project about BC Hydro’s Smart Meter. She told us about the process of starting a business. She was a brilliant student in UBC who won a lot of case competitions. Instead of just getting a job after graduated, she was brave enough to start her own business. She has no experience for her to get aid from the bank. Most of the foundation money was the prize of winning the case competitions. However, she got an Angel investor to support her business. The development is very difficult which took Janice and her team a year to prepare.

After researching, I found out that Energy Aware Technology, Janice’s company, is the 2006 BC Hydro Sustainability prize winner. The selling point of the product is the environmental friendliness. Nowadays people care more about environment and the energy. Not because of the energy is expensive, but just this is a right thing to do. Starting a business, to be successful, has to match the market trend and the customer’s taste.

The example we are given in class which talked about the supply chain is Zara. I am interested in it not because I am a girl and Zara is a popular clothing brand, but also it special business model.

Comparing to the other brand, it is differentiable by building the factory in Europe but not Asia. Many clothing manufacturing build their factory in Asia, especially China, since the resource and labor there are cheap. Lowering the cost equals increasing profit. While Zara does not follow the pattern. It does not care about decreasing the cost in this way. It shortens the supply chain, which means they cut the shipping time and can provide new apparels faster than any other firms. In the fashion industry, who becomes the first can gain more market share.

Zara does very well in limiting the supply chain. In my opinion, it also does very well in the marketing. According to the class which talks about brand positioning, I think Zara applies this technique to boost their sales. By limited the quota of the clothing and shelf lives, Zara creates a shortage and scarcity of their products. Customers then buy more of the products and visit the shop more often. They provide what customers needs faster. That is its point of different.

http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?sid=d65d9600-68a0-44d5-9ad7-45b1e5baf270%40sessionmgr104&vid=1&hid=105&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=bth&AN=22161327