Apollo is fully allowed to make things difficult by complaining on social media that he thinks the pricing is unfair. What is illegal or even unethical about that?
Hmm, it's implied at least later in the Twitter thread that it's predatory pricing. John's friend Pieter Level's quotes [0] Wikipedia [1] as follows:
>"Under Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, pricing below cost is prohibited where the seller has a dominant market position and the pricing will have an anti-competitive effect.[22][23]"
It's not just competition. In most markets, your customer's willingness to pay follows a power law: you'll have one customer who's willing & able to pay an exorbitant amount, your next biggest might pay 50% less, and so on down, until you get to the mass market who all want your product for $99.99. Companies that operate at the head of the distribution (i.e. most B2B companies) want to be able to practice price discrimination, and charge that one whale what they're actually willing to pay. Otherwise, they could be leaving a significant amount of money on the table.
The competition aspect is pretty commonly worked around - basically every B2B company I know has no compunctions against calling up a competitor, posing as a potential customer, and getting a price quote for competitive research. Or if they have slightly more compunctions, they'll call up a market research firm, hand over some money, and the market research firm will call up all the competitors in the industry, pose as a potential customer, and sell that information back to all the competitors in the market.
I suspect that SpaceX's published price tag is really there to motivate the employees. It's a reminder that Elon's goal is to make spaceflight a mass-market product that an ordinary middle-class citizen can afford, and so he wants that number to go down over time. In many B2B markets without price transparency, there's a tendency towards lazyness on the engineering side; when your revenue comes from how effective your salespeople are at jacking up the price, there's little incentive to focus on small efficiencies that keep the overall price down. Elon wants to keep the focus on small efficiencies so that the price gets low enough that it becomes an everyday thing.
All potentially illegal, but more often legal and not even controversial. The important distinction is whether the prices were set to maintain or exploit a non-competitive situation, vs. to compete in a still fair/open market. There's no issue with undercutting competitors if they exist. There's no issue with charging a brand premium. In either case, competitors can respond as they see fit. It's only when there are no competitors that these choices deserve scrutiny.
Since he has control over pricing, couldn't he submit with a free price tag, and change it to something insanely high once accepted. That way no sane person would buy it, and he'd still prove his point.
He _had_ to submit an app and get it in for this to work ofcourse, otherwise this was a moot point. And it's a good wakeup call to everyone. Security awewareness helps sometimes unfortunately when you make a splash.
please stop fear mongering. prices aren't a trade secret and difficult to enforce even if its covered under an NDA
if you have to threaten your own customers to not tell others about how much you are paying them (because you are afraid of competition) then you are in the WRONG business.
you don't get to hide behind currency fluctation. as a customer he has all the right to be outraged. it's not like production costs had raised or whatever, google has chosen to put that price on that invoice when it could have chosen any other price or even to keep the old price
I am not really sure it's the price change that is most offensive. It's the fact they were willing to do it without regard for their current customers. I don't want to deal with a company that is happy to change their price whenever they feel like it and I get the short end of the stick.
Apollo is fully allowed to make things difficult by complaining on social media that he thinks the pricing is unfair. What is illegal or even unethical about that?
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