The actuel Prime future...

[Sylvain Cote]

(08-20-2014 08:58 PM)walter b Wrote:  Well, if you're complaing about HP's prices in Canada, what shall we Europeans do? Cry?

You should ... I do ;-)

(08-21-2014 03:55 AM)Kevin Ouellet Wrote:  There's no excuse why the price difference between USA and Canada should be this
high compared to other products. No wonder why HP calcs sell so poorly in Canada
and why many retailers no longer carry them...

I completely agree.

Like I said before, HP has always overpriced their handhelds in Canada.

Between the 70's and the 90's, they had brand recognition, the technology,
the Wow factor and dedicated users that was doing underground marketing for them.
Also, because most Canadian citizen was not aware of the price difference between
here and USA, they happily bought HP calculators at the inflated price.

Then several thing happened ...
> HP changed from an engineering driven company to a marketing driven one
> in 1993 the web was introduced through Mosaic
> in 1995 the Internet started being available to the general public
> soon afterward commercial web site selling calculators at USA prices appears.
> then they applied the following algorithm:

Code:


10 kill the calculator division
20 wait until sales start going down
30 start a new calculator division elsewhere
40 hire a new development team
50 buy external IP from people/company
60 release new calculators
70 goto 10

What still surprise me today, after they almost lost everything, HP Canada still
think they can sell their calculators at the inflated price here even after the
Canadian closed market has been busted by the Internet.

Sylvain