Researchers Study "Harbingers of Failure," Consumers Who Habitually Pick Losers 300
AmiMoJo writes: Is your favorite TV show always getting cancelled? Did you love Crystal Pepsi? Were you an early adopter of the Zune? If you answered yes to these questions, researchers say you might be a "Harbinger of Failure." In a study published in the Journal of Marketing Research, researchers identified a group of consumers whose preferences can predict products that will fail. “Certain customers systematically purchase new products that prove unsuccessful,” wrote the study authors. “Their early adoption of a new product is a strong signal that a product will fail.”
Firefly (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Firefly (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought we just called those people Browncoats.
As a wise fictional character once said, "May have [picked] the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one." Not sure that applies to the Zune, though, although it was brown...
Presumably "Crystal Pepsi" wasn't brown (and, hopefully, wasn't so pure that it had a slight blue tint...)
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Brown? Brown?! Thanks, but I like to see my food. [nbc.com]
Re:Crystal Pepsi (Score:2)
It was clear. There was a "clear soda" trend running around that time that didn't even last as long as the "dry beer" craze.
"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters? (Score:3)
Is this just another term for hipsters? People who seek out things that everyone else has dismissed for (usually) good reasons.
Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is this just another term for hipsters? People who seek out things that everyone else has dismissed for (usually) good reasons.
No. Because the "good reason" usually is "most people aren't doing that anymore." The article is about things that *never* become cool, not things that were cool in grandpa's day.
The real problem with being a hipster is that the ideal of non-conformity is inconsistent with the idea of fashion.
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I thought hipsters all owned iPhone and Macbooks, and shopped at The Gap. I.e. they are all about conformity, fads and Buzzfeed.
No, those things are actually anti-hip. As soon as something gets big enough for Buzzfeed it's for a different audience.
"Hip" implies arcane knowledge possessed by a select few. A great band with a small local following is "hip"; when they make it big they're no longer "hip", although they may still be "cool". The iPhone is pretty much the antithesis of hip, no matter how cool it may be. If I were to guess what hipster phone model might look like, it might be something low-cost Indian android phone manufa
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I thought hipsters all owned iPhone and Macbooks, and shopped at The Gap. I.e. they are all about conformity, fads and Buzzfeed.
Not quite, at least insofar as the Gap.
Living here in Portland (which is somehow an outpost of hipsterdom), Most of the hipster types buy local clothing brands wherever possible (e.g. Keen, Archaeopteryx, etc), usually shift OS/laptop allegiances as needed (the apparent new thing now is to have a laptop running Linux with Docker atop it so you can run any x86 OS you want in order to impress your buddies), and the phones are nowadays either an iPhone or a phablet (the bigger the better).
There are points of c
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Actually the exact opposite is true.
Which is necessarily true in any kind of fashion, even if it's anti-fashion. Hipsterism is a kind of contrarianism; the attraction is having things that most other people don't even know about. But strict contrarianism is morally indistinguishable from strict conformism.
Now outside of major metropolitan centers like Manhattan when people say "hipster" they mean something else; there's not enough of a critical mass of non-conformity to cater to an actual "hipster" class. What they're really talking about i
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My wife has terrible luck with products and she is *NOT* a hipster by any means. She's very particular about things and many of them get cancelled causing yet another search. But I suspect it's her particularities that don't match what people commonly want that leads to their demise (for instance she has a big issue with scents, so finding unscented make-up is important for her --- other people probably don't care and have other priorities).
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What are some examples of things she's purchased and which got canceled this way? Or other choices she's made which have turned out to be duds?
Did she buy a Pontiac Aztek?
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I think you have the concept of hipster exactly backwards. Usually hipsters seem to cluster around emerging trends and often seem to be influential enough that an ironic embrace of vintage/past products often produces a resurgence of that product.
It's debatable whether hipsters even exist, or whether it's a group that identifies products before they become popular or whether it's a group that's defined as clustering around products that became popular.
Hipster tactics (Score:2)
I think you have the concept of hipster exactly backwards.
Not really. I'm just querying whether this is a particular subset of the use of the term, particularly with respect to those who intentionally pick products slightly outside the mainstream. If someone bought a Zune in a (lame) attempt to be trendy that would seem to be "hipster" behavior. Buy the unusual product which is likely doomed to failure and look down your nose at people who buy the more mainstream products. More of a social tactic than a demographic.
Usually hipsters seem to cluster around emerging trends and often seem to be influential enough that an ironic embrace of vintage/past products often produces a resurgence of that product.
Aside from maybe some tshirts I really canno
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Aside from maybe some tshirts I really cannot think of any "ironic embrace of vintage" that resulted in a meaningful resurgence of a product
How about Pabst Blue Ribbon [qz.com] beer? Or the otherwise inexplicable growth of vinyl record sales [vox.com]?
True to the nature of hipster-ism, these things will decline again at some point. But the presence of cool tastemakers interested in retro stuff is a real thing that impacts sales beyond just their own ranks. God help us all if these people rediscover fax machines.
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Cheap ass people who buy stuff on special at end of life expecting miracles ie believing the lies they are told because they want to believe what favours them. That distorts the measure because of course by then many people believe the product is a failure. Now if they were early adopter failure selectors, hmm, now isn't that what early adopters who pick the right product are, people who have figured out what the losing products are and picked the winner.
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Hipsters are the leading edge of sweet FA. They move in on existing microcultures, not because they are actually interested in what they center around, but because they perceive it to be cool. And then proceed to ruin it for the existing members of that culture. It's why they are universally despised and hated, and rightly so.
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I think the failure in the popular music industry is probably a pretty complex topic. I believe it comes from two big sources: the internet, and the whole Napster debacle in the late 1990s (and specifically, the music industry's response to it). I have two theories: 1) Basically, they killed the golden goose with Napster. People had a new way of sharing music and finding things they liked, and even despite all the "piracy" they were selling more music than ever before, but then the record industry whined
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Ah yes, the much vaunted "Hipster-Hate" of the Slashdot neckbeard crowd. Quick, get on board the Hipster-hate train before it leaves the station! It's cool to hate on "hipsters" now, dontchya know...that's the new trend!
Of course, slavishly following the new hipster-hate trend might make you...wait for it...
a hipster.
Although maybe you neckbeards were hating on hipsters *before it was cool*, in which case you are still hipsters.
See, the great thing about all the stereotypical hipsters I know, and I know q
Last three their own horse (Score:2)
The others were surrounded by the most noise.
Re:Last three their own horse (Score:4, Interesting)
Lennart is professional programmer who has had great success. You sound jealous. The software packages you list are actually the most used solutions, not failures. Failure doesn't mean, "I don't like it, waaaaa."
And I'm sure Lennart would tell you that applications are different than kernels, and you're comparing apples and oranges. I know he'd see that, because he's a programmer.
RedHat has huge resources, they have a war chest, they're not in trouble or "stuck with" anything. They've written software in the past that they don't still use. They're not known as being irrational or emotional, they're known for being the business-and-oss-friendly distro. They make pragmatic decisions.
Hate away. But remember, attacking the man is a logical fallacy, not a rational point. You will be understood accordingly.
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You may not like the choices made by Red Hat but all the technologies you cited except maybe GTK+/GNOME are widely successful in term of market adoption.
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Unfortunately IMO, from what I can tell, GTK+ is easily much more popular in the Linux market than Qt, mainly because most distros use it (either with Gnome or with one of its forks). Qt is very popular in certain markets (especially embedded Linux devices), but if you're looking at the Linux desktop market it's all GTK+. Of course, there's probably a lot more embedded Linux devices out there than there are desktops running Linux...
As a programmer, Qt is far and away a much nicer toolkit to work with if y
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I've been running Redhatty distros for 13 years and I haven't had too much trouble with any of those. Well, not until Gnome 3 anyway.
RPM: If you're using RPM to install your RPM's instead of yum or dnf, you're doing it wrong.
PulseAudio: Was a bit quirky a few versions ago, now it just works. It can do things that Alsa/OSS can't
NetworkManager: It's always just worked for me, but I have heard that it had issues with wifi in it's early days. I didn't have that trouble since I used wired with it.
.
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RPM: If you're using RPM to install your RPM's instead of yum or dnf, you're doing it wrong.
Mandriva/Mageia's URPMI is an excellent RPM wrapper.
A distro update is as simple as adding the new repositories and performing an update.
http://maximumhoyt.blogspot.co... [blogspot.com]
Links to the actual study? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Links to the actual study? (Score:5, Funny)
Anyone have an actual link to the actual paper?
The study is only available on HD DVD.
Re:Links to the actual study? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Links to the actual study? (Score:5, Informative)
You'd think that Slashdot editors would try to include that kind of link in the summary as if there's anything worth reading it's the source itself.
Re:Links to the actual study? (Score:5, Funny)
You'd think that Slashdot editors would try to include that kind of link in the summary as if there's anything worth reading it's the source itself.
I've been here a few years....I wouldn't think that at all.
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You'd think that Slashdot editors would try to include that kind of link in the summary as if there's anything worth reading it's the source itself.
Double checks that your UID is newer than mine so that I can give that classic Slashdot response:
You must be new here.
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Back in my day, you were lucky to get a gopher link and you liked it.
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Sorry, I looked for a non-paywalled copy but couldn't find one. I thought the story would be a good opportunity to mean about stuff we like that was cancelled/discontinued, and how if online advertisers could identify these people they could spam them with adverts for competitor's products.
I'm trying to keep Slashdot alive here with a light story and a chance for some good old geek nostalgia/venting.
Zune (Score:3)
My Zune still works fine and I'm typing this on a first gen SurfacePro, some products that do their job well just don't sell (in this case because of the worlds worst marketing).
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Most users of windows phone can be added to that list too. Except those where MS-indoctrinated company MCSE's pushed it on them.
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Yep. I love mine, but the general populous hasn't bought in........I don't know if Windows 10 will help the situation, but I'm still hopeful.
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We are hearing that excuse since windows phone 7: "but wait until the next version". It will fail too, since running Android apps won't be flawlessly (see Blackberry how that works out) and "universal apps" won't be developed outside MS since desktop users, where windows is large, are not interested in mobile apps but in full-sized desktop programs. The usage stats of the included windows 8 apps were dramatic, even among the windows 8 adepts.
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You remind me of the Dell rep who insisted that the Dell Phone would wipe out the iPhone with in a year. In 2009.
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The Streak was mocked as a phablet and yet here we are.....5" phones are common.
But I recognize that Windows Phone won't be besting iOS or Android any time soon.....I just want it to be big enough that I don't have to worry about it being killed off any time soon......
Re:Zune (Score:5, Funny)
My Zune still works fine and I'm typing this on a first gen SurfacePro,.....
So, what new products have you bought recently?
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Notice he is typing it on a first gen surface pro WITH THE KEYBOARD.
As all generations of the surface are pretty useless without the keyboard. (I own one, I know this as a fact)
That is why the surface is not a success, Microsoft's inability to get user interfaces right. The hardware is sound and great. It's the steaming crap OS that is installed by default that is the problem.
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I'm typing this on a first gen SurfacePro.
The Surface Pro was good. The real bomb was the Surface RT. Now that they got rid of it (the Surface 3 is x86) it seems that the sales are picking up again.
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My Zune still works fine and I'm typing this on a first gen SurfacePro, some products that do their job well just don't sell (in this case because of the worlds worst marketing).
Many good products fail. Success in the market often has little to do with the usefulness or quality of the product.
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Do you squirt the social on your Zune? That was the most bizarre thing ever.
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I do not, they have some serious naming problems there at MS.
Why nobody cares about Zune (Score:5, Insightful)
My zune still works as well. I use it every day.
Maybe you do but if so you are a good approximation of the entire user base. I'm not sure I've ever actually even seen a Zune in the wild.
Good battery life, large amount of storage.
That's not exactly a compelling argument to buy one over the competing products. Nobody cared about the Zune because there was nothing special or compelling about it. It was a me-too product introduced several years too late to matter. It's most compelling selling point (and compelling is a stretch) was that it wasn't made by Apple. Since people mostly like Apple better than Microsoft that is an argument without very wide appeal. The only way Zune would have had a chance would have been to be technically WAY better than the iPod and it simply wasn't.
Only downside is that you have to use the stupid zune software.
That's a pretty huge downside considering it's basically abandon-ware at this point.
I'm sure the apple fanbois will be shocked that I don't buy a new mp3 player every year when this one still works fine.
Since standalone mp3 player sales are falling like a rock I doubt the apple fanbois you seem to want to sneer at will be shocked or even care. Basically everyone listens to music on their smartphones now. Why carry two devices when one will do the job just fine?
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I had a phillips mp3 player for about a decade it was dropped multiple times, stepped on, submersed in water, left on top the car while I drove away, put through the washer 5-6 times. I picked it specifically because it didn't require any software to get music on it but was very pleased with it especially after buying my sons a few ipods and saw how easily they cracked the screens and broke them. The later versions were more cheaply made I bought my wife one it worked well and though more durable than most
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Rage on into that good night.
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No, he's exactly right. Who actually listens to music on a Zune or an iPod now? Smartphones have made standalone MP3 players completely obsolete.
I used to have not an iPod nor a Zune, but an iRiver H320 (which I upgraded to a 30GB hard drive). I haven't used it in years; I just use my phone for that stuff now. Any smartphone these days will hold my entire music collection easily.
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I have my smart phone in my pocket at the gym, and my 30 dollar mp3 player in my arm band.
Bluetooth headphones seem to either be wicked uncomfortable (plantronic backbeats) or exquisitely sensitive to sweat (Motorola). So it's nice being able to listen to music over corded headphones, and still have the smartphone available to do whatever in between sets.
Also the mp3 player just fucking 'works' on demand. Spotify seems to crash about 50% of the time and requires a reboot of the phone.
Also having the headph
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I can't figure out how people use a phone for music; my phone has 16 GB capacity, and I have 105 GB of music
Really? You can't figure that out? My phone as a 128GB capacity and my music library is less than that. No disrespect intended but you have what is basically a cheap phone by today's standards. I never, ever need to sync my phone to change the music on it and honestly I couldn't be bothered even if storage capacity were an issue.
Constantly re-syncing my phone based on what I feel like listening too gets to be very tiring.
So don't. I never have. Buy a phone with a large enough capacity and get on with life.
Popularity matters sometimes (Score:2)
The Zune as a product was solid. It played MP3's as intended, offered all of the correct features, and the UI wasn't unpleasant. Battery life was good.
That's the problem though. Nobody ever really claimed that Zune was terrible. But there were very few reasons to buy one instead of an iPod. It wasn't better value for money for most people. It didn't have meaningfully better features, didn't cost a lot less, and by the time it came out many people who really wanted an MP3 player were already locked into Apple's ecosystem. Microsoft didn't make a horrible product but being solid isn't good enough when you are that late to the party. You have to be sub
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even on dying tech sites.
Slashdot is NOT dying.
It has been dead for a while.
Link to original paper (Score:2)
Re:Link to original paper (Score:5, Informative)
Prediction after the fact. (Score:5, Insightful)
A better way to predict success is to do what some companies are already doing: watch who sets the trend, and follow them.
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Maybe those "harbingers of failure" are just people who are a bit more persistent in their choices and less fickle, or they are the normal ones: people who pick stuff because they like it, not because their friends do.
You're taking this WAY too personally...
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In Figure 1, we report a histogram describing how long new products survive using the full sample of 8,809 new products. Of these items, 5,301 (60%) did not survive for 3 years (12 quarters). The average survival duration for these failed items was 84.68 weeks, or approximately 21 months.
If you have a person, who for whatever reason dislikes a big brand (e.g. Uncle Barry drinks Coke and he's a fuck head so I won't drink it) they're likely choosing among products that have a 60% failure rate, which makes it more likely than not that there will be some people who have histories including sev
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I think your analysis is insightful (...and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter).
I feel like I either have very strong preferences or none at all. Things that I like I tend to have a kind of complex rationale for why I like them. Cost enters the picture, but only as a tail-end constraint, and usually if the cost is extreme. Generally I'm willing to pay more -- or not buy at all -- because the less expensive products fails my preference rationale.
This being said, I'm always surprised at the peopl
please EA Windows 10 (Score:3)
I don't want to live in a world where I can't watch DVDs out of the box through Media Center.
I'll get right on it ... (Score:2)
I'm installing Windows 10 right now, just so that we can watch Microsoft's empire crumble ...
failure is short-term (Score:3)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Family Guy and Firefly were more or less sabotaged by politics. The reason Family Guy came back was Fox executives looked at the sales numbers of the DVDs and basically said "WHO THE FUCK CANCELED THIS?"
Now Family Guy has the opposite problem. Everyone knows the show has run its course (Seth especially), but new episodes keep coming out.
Quality programming (Score:2)
If all TV were content on demand, you'd probably see a lot more quality shows and many shows currently on getting canceled.
Judging by the popularity of the Kardashians I very, very, very much doubt that.
Re:Speaking of TV shows (Score:5, Insightful)
The older demographic may have the money, but the common marketing wisdom is that they're set in their buying habits--advertising to them won't generate sales. They want the younger audience, because they feel that that's the one they can hook.
suckers born that have $$$ (Score:2)
What it tells me is that no matter how bad your product is, SOMEBODY (evidently a large percentage) will buy it.
Hmm....there's a money making lesson here somewhere (if not for my morals..)
I have Firefly on HD-DVD do I make it? (Score:2)
I am just kidding, I only have Serenity on HD-DVD. Strangely, I could not find any of my favorite series on HD-DVD, e.g. Firefly, Futurama, Odyssey 5, Space: Above & Beyond, Twin Peaks...
Among the harbingers of doom (Score:5, Funny)
The people who like Timothy's editing of stories on the weekends & the changes that Dice has been bringing to /.
Clickbait (Score:4, Insightful)
The actual report is in the Chicago tribune, behind a paywall. Fuck that and fuck the idiot who submitted this non-story.
I would like to volunteer as the chief harbinger (Score:5, Funny)
I have anti-charisma and whenever I zig, everyone else in the universe zags. If I like something, that means that 99.99% of the rest of the world doesn't. If I hate something, it's probably going to be a big hit.
Mind you, this isn't just contrarianism. I usually don't even pay much attention to what the rest of the world thinks about something. I only find out after-the-fact that every other human being on planet earth else disagrees with me--on EVERYTHING.
Want to win a political campaign? Hire me to campaign for your opponent.
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It really depends. Are you picking stuff which is crap, and the general populace correctly realizes is crap? Or are you picking stuff which is too high-quality for the general market?
How the fuck should I know? I only know that whatever I think or like is not what everyone else does. Whatever I do is not what everyone else does. Whatever I say is not what everyone else says.
Happened again this weekend. Let me explain.
I liked Terminator Salvation and Terminator 3. T3 was a little redundant, but I liked the humor and its much darker, fatalistic take on the future. I thought Salvation was good when I first saw it. And I've come to like it more and more as I've watched it since. Christan Ba
Great Article (Score:2)
Maybe you should avoid it.
Betting on the wrong horse (Score:2)
For awhile, I refused to become interested in any new TV shows. I had some shows I loved and they kept getting cancelled one after another (Futurama, Pushing Daises, etc). Meanwhile, reality shows like Survivor kept getting season after season. The one reality show that I liked - The Mole - was cancelled as well. That was the only show where using your brain was rewarded more than physical challenges and backstabbing. I've been slowly getting interested in shows again, but now that we've cut cable it's
What nonsense. (Score:3)
There will inevitably be a group of people who seem to always pick things that don't work, it's the nature of huge numbers. If you get a hundred million quarters, you'll find that there are probably close to a million of them that flip tails a dozen times in a row. Human nature would skew this somewhat, but I doubt this demonstrates people who are attracted to trends that fail - more like they're simply not following the mainstream trends.
Yeah, that's me, at least for TV (Score:2)
If I really like a TV show there is a great chance it will be canceled. I'm not sure if this applies to consumer goods though. But I think it just because I've got vastly different interests than the average American (just like many of you do as well).
Brand/product persistance seems dead anyway (Score:2)
I don't know if its my perception or not, but it seems to me that very few products anymore have any persistence. It's not just a question of picking a loser -- it seems like so many products have an initial run and then disappear to be replaced by something else.
I suspect it's a byproduct of easier product design using computer aided design and the heavy use of contract manufacturing overseas. CAD makes it easy to tweak a design to create the new-car-model kinds of changes or just something different. C
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Contract manufacturing isn't going to magically make tooling and setup costs just disappear, and some manufacturer isn't going to just eat those and go without a profit. Newer tools (CAD) and processes do make it easier and cheaper to make new designs though. The thing CM is good for is allowing smaller companies to get products to market, because they don't have to have their own factory (which requires a lot of capital), they just pay an existing factory to make it for them. It increases the market siz
Product testing applications (Score:2)
Pay me to use your competitors' products.
My last 4 cars :-( (Score:2)
My last four car purchases were a Pontiac, an Oldmobile, a Mercury and a Tesla.
The Pontiac Grand Am and Old Alero were good cars. I still have the Mercury Mariner and Tesla Model S.
And yes, all my favorite TV shows usually bite the dust
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I like the watch.
Wait a minute..... (Score:2)
So, does this mean ... (Score:5, Funny)
Bring them to Slashdot (Score:3)
Slashdot is the ultimate mecca for the "Harbingers of Doom", a site literally ripe with people who will vociferously back the worst of products that obviously have no future. In fact I use this very site myself to predict failure for some things, as there are a lot of repeat posters here that spend 24x7 backing future failed products.
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because fucking TV companies are retarded for canceling Heroes and Forever, I'm not a harbinwhatever
Harbingers? or just early adopters? (Score:5, Insightful)
Certainly some early adopters pick products that don't take off, and mathematically some of these will have done it multiple times.
But the article claims that some people are actually predictors-- that their product choices have predictive value for product failure.
Is this actually true? It's easy to select out a set of people who have bought failed products, and then cull out of that set the ones who have not also sometimes bought successful products. But is this group statistically able to make future predictions?
I'm doubtful. Clearly, the way to not select products that don't grab a market niche... is to not be an early adopter. Lots of products fail; if you're an early adoptor, you're likely to be adopting failed products. If you instead wait to see where a product is going before buying-- you never buy products that fail a month after launch.
FWIW, the original article is here:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa... [ssrn.com]
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According to the study's authors (as quotyed by the Chicago Tribune) "Certain customers systematically purchase new products that prove unsuccessful,". Also: "Our findings challenge the conventional wisdom that positive customer feedback is always a signal of future success."
So they are saying that this sub-group's purchases of new products is indeed predictive of failure.
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AKA "Early Adopters"..... early adopters necessarily adopt things before they have had a chance to fail or succeed in the marketplace. Unless they can show these people also don't ever adopt successful products, this seems like selecting the data to prove your theory. Or, maybe these people just recently discovered McDonald's....
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Its not early adopters, its a specific subset of early adopters. I highly suspect that this subset is drawn to these products for one of two reasons: First, anti-advertising, meaning that they are attracted to products whose advertising campaigns suck and something about that suckitude or quirkiness draws this subset in. Second, the underdog lovers. Because of bad advertising or press, writing is on the wall early that the product isn't going to launch well, and this subset then looks to buy the "underd
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Exactly. Sometimes products fail because they there isn't a mass market for them at the time.
Take the Creative Nomad Jukebox which came out in ~2001, which is about the size of a CD Walkman, and shipped with six GB of space for tracks. It was a quite usable unit. However, it didn't really have a market because of its size, and lack of battery life. The original iPod was an incremental improvement over it... but brought decent battery life and a smaller size to the table, which is why Apple was initially
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Game Gear was huge in the UK, M:TG is still going after what, twenty years?
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and if you'd read better, you'd see that I utterly refuted that claim, as Magic: The Gathering has been going strong for two decades averaging four new expansions per year and the trade in individual cards is doing better than ever.
Re:Other examples (Score:5, Insightful)
The point of the article is that the same people constantly prove to be early adopters of products that don't succeed in the market.
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Tab Cola had several problems, one it tasted like cola unlike Coke and Pepsi, much more like RC Cola [wikipedia.org], it was purchased to compete with RC's Diet Rite cola, It used sodium saccharin, which has been the target of several attempts to be listed as a health hazard, but those commercials killed them, https://youtu.be/DJL4yQn_7qQ [youtu.be], everybody remembers the commercial, few remembered the product.
Bill Gates (Score:3, Interesting)
If we need to pick a 'celebrity' to represent this crowd Bill Gates would be the perfect shoe-in
Other than his first venture - Microsoft - none of his other investments make sense
Furthermore, when Bill Gates stepped down from MS he picked an absolute loser, Steve Ballmer, as his replacement
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Other than his first venture - Microsoft - none of his other investments make sense
"Other than being one of the richest men in the world, he's poor".
Re:67% is 75th percentile (Score:5, Informative)
The study, available in MS-Word format in a link posted by a kindly slashdotter, contains this gem. 67% is 75th percentile? People who trust the findings of such articles are the harbingers of onslaught of stupidity.
Careful complaining about stupidity.
Less than 25% bought more than 67% flops, and 75% didn't. That makes people picking 67% flops or more the 75% percentile.
Re:67% is 75th percentile (Score:4, Funny)
picking 67% flops puts you in the 75th percentile (Score:2)
# of flops chosen (position in set)
Group 1: Between 0% and 25% flops (25th percentile) in the classification set
Group 2: Between 25% and 50% flops (50th percentile) in the classification set
Group 3: Between 50% and 67% flops (75th percentile) in the classification set
Group 4: Over 67% flops in the classification set
Those particular numbers (one in four, two in four, two in three, >2/3) are indicative: the study set consists of people who made only three or four choices. (If it were larger numbers, the cut points wouldn't be such even numbers)
This is not significant.
And, more significantly, that's way too few to tell if membership in a set is predictive.