BlackBerry slashes PlayBook's prices by 50%

Article is from paper in India. Amounts listed are in Rupees.
I wonder what the strategy is. If the sale ends in a couple of days will they go back up to the original price and if they do, will the prices go back everywhere else?

I was actually thinking of getting another one this Thursday for my brother who is an Angry Birds fanatic.

Any guesses as to what's happening?

http://business-standard.com/india/n...-by-50/460005/

i managed to get my Playbook 16GB on the 24th of December, for £169.99 down from £249.99 here in the UK.
Was too good to let it go!

Originally Posted by jrohland

I'm thinking RIM is employing a tipping point strategy. That might work very well in India. The idea is to sell them as a loss leader to build a big enough base for developers to get interested. Once that happens, and the tech influencers see the quality hardware and software the PB has, they will start telling the less tech savvy consumers to get a PB. At some point there is a large enough user base for the balance to tip away from the other brand and to RIM. Then everyone has to have it or risk being so 15 seconds ago.

You lost me. Say that again.

I used to live in Annandale. Hope you"re getting good weather. :)

Originally Posted by ADozenEggs@aol.com

You lost me. Say that again.

I used to live in Annandale. Hope you"re getting good weather. :)

Annandale in Dumfries & Galloway?

Originally Posted by loreburne

Annandale in Dumfries & Galloway?

Annandale in Fairfax Cnty. Gallows road. Was working consulting for Exxon-Mobil. Nice quiet area.

its on sale......like everywhere else.....why is that so hard to understand?

It would be a lot cheaper to hire programmers to produce those apps @ 10k a pop.

The pricing is identical to in Canada, U.S., etc. To me it makes sense to roll out the same pricing worldwide insofar as, otherwise, arbitrage gets you there anyway and is messier. Don't know why there'd be any different strategy in India as anywhere else where they have priced the 16GB at the equivalent of C$300-ish: get it into more hands, grow market share.

Originally Posted by jrohland

As you used to live in Annandale, I'll go slow and use small words. :rolleyes: Actually I live near there.

So let us assume people won't buy an expensive tablet unless there are a lot of great apps available for it. Let us also assume application developers won't invest in creating apps unless there are enough customers with that tablet. In this situation the tablet maker has to either pay the developers to write the apps, and/or sell the tab at a low enough price that people will buy it even if there aren't that many apps for it.

The tab maker knows there is a certain number of tab owners the developer needs to see before they will write an app. Let's do some math. It will be fun;

It cost $10,000 to write an application. Call it Nasty Vultures.
Statistically, 10% of the tab owners will buy Nasty Vultures at $1.00.
The developer needs to know there are 100,000 tab owners in order to break even.
In this simple model, 100,000 units sold is the tipping point. RIM knows it has to lower the price enough to sell 100,000 units, even if they loose money, so the developer will write the application. Once the app is written, more people will buy the tab, even at a higher price, because they really want to play Nasty Vultures.

In this case RIM took a short term loss for a long term gain.

I understand. But, hypothetically, if that's the strategy would you raise prices to their pre-sale level and possibly bring sales back to grinding halt or would you seek out a middle ground while you get all those developers you just mentioned to work on having those apps out before Apple releases iPad 3 in March or April of '12. Or would you keep the price down as it seems to be attracting people from all walks of life. My buddy at Radio Shack also said, as far as he knows, the sale ends on the 31st, but he doesn't know what the price will be on Jan 1.