The plan to pay for ETFs to switch from other carriers does not seem to make much financial sense. For a monthly plan of $50, it would take T-Mobile many years to break even on this initial cost and it is not clear if they will be guaranteed to retain the subscriber for that time. Unless they again charge the equivalent of an ETF on their contract, something seems off here.
Their current deal is $50 for an "unlimited" plan that switches to EDGE after 500MB and $60 for a similar plan with a 2 GB limit (or 3 GB, can't remember which).
But I am not sure this is the big problem in this space.
Current delivery time = 1 day for last mile + >1 day for warehouse -> local area
This method reduces the last mile delivery time down to 30 mins but it is not clear how the second part would be optimized down. At least, without losing the value proposition of Amazon - giant centralized warehouses instead of local retail outlets.
(just using orders of magnitude for an example, the actual numbers for best efficiency probably aren't quite so nice)
The 1000 most frequently ordered items in a warehouse near your neighborhood.
The 10000 most frequently ordered items in a city-wide warehouse.
The 100,000 most frequently ordered items in a regional warehouse.
Amazon already has the regional warehouse part.
I'd guess that this might be worth doing even if only the 1,000 most frequently ordered items can get there in 30 minutes, and should definitely be worth doing if you can get the 10,000 most frequently ordered items there in 30 minutes.
By having more local warehouses that stock the top x most sold things. 100% of the things I can readily remember that I ordered the last 2 or 3 months are so common that they were all in stock in the local shop that I bought most of them at (a large online retailer here in the Netherlands has 6 or 8 or so shops across the country, for local pick up or to try stuff in-store). And they were not the most common things either - a steam wall paper remover, a router (of the woodworking type, not the networking type), a specific type of headphone. If they can have those levels of stock in high street bricks and mortar shops, they could have even larger inventories when they could store them in fully automated warehouses in cheap industrial areas. The accuracy in stock prediction ('shop stock', not 'financial markets stock', obviously) is jaw-dropping.
Man this is going to destroy high street shopping (even further, I might add) - imagine being able to order 10 outfits for trying on from your own home, try them on and send the 9 you don't want back right away, in less time than it would have taken you to just drive to wherever you can buy it off line. If clothing (and other main street) shops are having a hard time now, wait until they have to compete with this...
I assume they would start to have distributed micro ware houses (shipping containers, dry vans) that are launching points for drones or dudes on scooters. I feel sorry for minimart.
Also, if serious, they should buy 7-11. I still don't understand why Blockbuster wasn't scooped up like hot cakes. All those juicy retail locations.
You bring up a good point, which is what I keep wondering too - where do they go? Dropbox already has sync APIs [0] across both iOS and Android (and presumably desktop), which must be their big bet to get to the central cloud store that you mention.
The part that is lacking is the metadata layer for pics/audio etc which allows apps to read others files, but that could be an easy layer on top of this API.
Julie Larson-Green brought the Ribbon interface to Office and then to other parts of Windows. Her ability to bring change to something as stable as the Office UI and the Windows Explorer UI was seen as a good thing.
While it is reasonable to assume a user's intent, it is also reasonable to assume a content publisher's intent to monetize their content. An advertising-funded web is the reality of today, unless Microsoft is proposing a radical change in this model.
The concept of Do Not Track, despite the emotional appeal of the name, essentially seems to be a compromise between privacy and advertising, keeping the advertising-based model intact while also allowing the extremely privacy focused (minority set of) individuals to have things their way.
Turning DNT on by default is a hardline approach and violates the spirit of this compromise. Instead, there needs to be more effort to constructively work with content providers, privacy advocates and advertisers to come up with a more explicit protocol that satisfies everyone's interests.
Your theory appears to be that the minority of privacy-focused individuals are weird outliers in preference. but my impression is that they are weird outliers in knowledge.
When I talk with non-technical relatives about their internet use, privacy is a major issue for them.
They know, for example, that Facebook knows a lot about them, which scares them. They don't know how much ad providers track them, but if you tell them they're more scared. Facebook is at least a known entity that provides them some benefit. Shadowy private companies profiling them is a lot harder to get comfortable with.
I agree there is a problem with the lack of knowledge, but I wouldn't assume that it is all regarding "shadowy private companies". A number of public privacy scares like the concern of Gmail reading people's email seem to fall into the same category.
Again, there are good and bad players on all sides, but my point was simply that ignoring reality and making a complete swing to no monetization for content seems to assume all players on one side are bad. A more open standard that allows clear knowledge is probably a better direction for Microsoft to pursue.
From what I have heard from people who work in pharma companies in India, the main reasons drugs are cheaper when manufactured in India are:
- not much R&D costs to design new drugs (however they do spend on designing the manufacturing process)
- cheap labor for manufacturing, including a good supply of chemical engineers.
- environmental regulations for chemical manufacturing are stricter in Western countries.
The article also quotes that this has changed in the last 7 years and adds more subtlety to the issue.
"But in 2005, India brought its law in line with World Trade Organization (WTO) rules recognising 20-year patents, pushing up the prices of newly launched drugs.
Cipla, India’s fourth largest pharmaceutical company by sales, has been pressing the government to allow widespread use of “compulsory licences”, which are permitted under WTO rules.
The licences allow companies to make existing life-saving drugs to sell in countries where they are otherwise priced out of reach."
While product design is important, availability of a strong manufacturing supply chain is also important. India's role in pharma is similar to what China provides for regular manufacturing.
