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Everything about this product is bizarre. My prediction: low sales. Google does not understand physical products very well.


There's no bad product, just bad pricing. I think Google and their partners really don't know how to price a new category product. They should be priced aggressively like the iPad was (when people expected it to be $800-$1000), and also as the iPhone, even though in the beginning Apple tried to sell to the "early adopters" with a higher price, too. But they quickly learned their lesson after just 2 months.

Google has already been through a few of these situations already ($300 Google TV set top box, $430 Chromebook at launch, $800 Honeycomb tablet at launch) and they still haven't learned anything. They haven't learned that the "early adopter price" tactic doesn't work well anymore. You need to price it for mainstream from day one, maintain the price throughout the year, and then just update the hardware for the same price every year. Consumers don't want to be cheated into buying a product that is twice as much at launch, compared to 6 months later.




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