techdirt - Well, here's an odd one. Apparently, an analyst at NPD Group, Stephen Baker, is worried that the rising popularity of netbooks is bad for the tech economy. He's claiming:
"History tells us that when we offer lower-priced products, it tends to drive down the average selling price across the board. The net result is to drive down revenue overall, even if there are more units out there."
I'm curious which tech history books he's reading, because that seems to go against pretty much every history of technology evolution I've ever seen. If you've watched the tech industry over the past few decades, things always get cheaper. It's the whole Moore's Law thing at work -- and every time things get cheaper, it allows for more to happen, making products more valuable to more people, and tends to expand, not contract, the wider overall market. Yes, the average selling price decreases, but that's a tautology. Of course if you decrease price, average selling price goes down. That's not analysis, that's saying 2 = 2. But to then say it means overall revenue goes down isn't necessarily true -- and in many tech sectors isn't true at all. In the end, providing a good product, at a reasonable price that many, many people want, is never "damaging" to the economy. It may shift things around, but it always opens up new opportunities.
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