Monthly Archives: April 2005

Pricing Conference Stories

Last week I attended the Professional Pricing Society‘s 16th annual Spring Conference in San Francisco. Over 500 pricing people were there, which of course is a lot of pricing people in one place. There were a couple dozen presentations, some … Read More

Toyota Backs Off Price Hikes

Despite earlier comments by the chairman of the Japanese auto giant, Toyota will not raise prices to take the heat off GM. Toyota and Honda fear a political backlash against their sucess in the US market. Honda CEO Takeo Fukui … Read More

Hardware Makes Software Pricing Harder

Intangible goods are always hard to price, and software is no exception. Advancing technology is making it harder. Server software typically had a per-CPU price. This provided a very rough proxy for value—companies running the software on a single CPU … Read More

Hynix Pays $185M Price-fixing Fine

The DRAM supplier agreed to the fine and a guilty plea in the Justice Department’s ongoing probe into DRAM pricing fixing. The DRAM market has terrible pricing pressures. Various suppliers, including Hynix and Infineon regularly agreed to pricing plans through … Read More

Pricing Conference in SF

I’m heading out to California for the Professional Pricing Society’s Spring Conference in San Francisco. For people who are new to pricing (usually just over half the attendees), the conferences provide a wealth of information, and for regulars, it’s a … Read More

Demand Estimation with Global Impact

A critical part of pricing is demand estimation. By understanding the shape of the demand curve, we can segment product offerings, and set pricing and promotions. When prices get fixed at an artificially low level, supply gets constrained, rather than … Read More

Newsletter Q2 2005

(My apologies for those of you coming here from the newsletter.) For those of you who only read the blog, you may want to check out the latest issue. Particularly interesting, IMHO, is the Value Price Waterfall, which takes the … Read More

Pricing Pressure All the Way to the Top

Michael Lawrie resigned as CEO of Siebel today after disappointing Q1 earnings. The CRM giant has suffered declining revenues since 2000. Lawrie came on board from IBM under a year ago to reverse the slide. Siebel faces growing competition from … Read More

The Wrong Way to Do Promotions

If you’re promotions make you feel like this, it’s time to rethink what you’re doing. Scott Adams is a genius, although our corporate world certainly gives him plenty of material.

No Relation Between Price and Quality?

Seth Godin posted this a couple of days ago: In industries under siege from external change (and I count music, books, airlines, pharmaceuticals, IT, telecommunications, etc) you’ll find that the extra fees extracted by the legacy companies DO NOT go … Read More