Wow, thanks for the link.

What’s weird about the map is that of the old “Eastern Bloc” only the Czech Republic has been “street-viewed”–not even East Germany. WTF?

If Google were a person, they’d be a Mad Scientist [wikimedia.org].

Okay, that makes sense.

In a sense it seems you showed how the market was “rational”–i.e. since in the larger market priced trumped all concerns, quality went out the window. Shame.

I certainly have no basis for criticism here, but I was wondering why you chose not to market your shocks to the $3000+ audience instead? It would seem with a reasonable markup (time and energy spent) to $800 or more, you could have captured the “low-end” there.

OTOH I would imagine persons who spend $3000+ on shocks are pretty much loyal consumers for some specific brands…

Oy. Warmed-over Libertarianism, anyone?

Anyway: I’d like to point out something from the article I think is silly, sort of in the same vein:

“The problem today is prices are prohibitively high for the average consumer,” says Gartner analyst Joseph Unsworth. “When you consider a hard drive, you can get a terabyte for about $90. If you look at an SSD — the Intel one I had with 160GB was $400. The point here is SSDs will never, ever be able to match hard disk drives on price per gigabyte.”

Let’s leave aside any regards we may have for the opinion of an “analyst”. However I find his statement to be especially pernicious because he has completely ignored the scale-of-production factor with cost, i.e. the same thing which was pushing down prices before…

To illustrate my point? Look up the price of any DIMMs of DDR2 or lower speed, and note that prices are higher than when they were at peak production. Why? Well duh–good ol’ supply and demand–and where supply exceeds demand, prices drop; and where they do not, prices rise.

My point? In sum: microeconomics is a good explanation of what happens here. At the macroeconomics level, however, the supply-demand fulcrum is overswung by the usual “madness of crowds” et al.