<p>I didn’t mean to suggest that IBM was charging 10 times more than anyone else, although it was clearly charging a large premium. What I was suggesting was that its margins were very high, and that it was easy to build clones and to undersell IBM. Which it was.</p>
<p>Also, I will admit forgetting that the Tandy computers were outselling Apples, but that’s because no one I knew who had a personal computer had a Tandy. By the time I was paying attention – i.e., about 1980 – Apple certainly seemed to have the marketing momentum. (But maybe that’s because I was in Palo Alto, and Apple was the home team.)</p>
<p>Even today, it is amazing that Apple only has 2.8% of the worldwide computer market. With all the marketing they are doing, it is hard to believe.</p>
<p>i always wondered whether that was actually necessary or not. does repeating actually do a damn thing to your hair? I’m a dude and have no clue.</p>
<p>Only if your hair was really really dirty to start with. Or you coated it in vegetable oil before shampooing. Or something else. Otherwise – nope. Not necessary at all.</p>
<p>Remember when Chevrolet decided to sell the Chevy Nova in Latin America…and forgot to consider what ‘Nova’ meant in those countries? “No va” in Spanish translates to ‘it does not go’. Not exactly a good tagline for an auto sales campaign.</p>
<p>It’s a marketing example I know…but the small detail missed is consideration of phonetic pronunciations and how they translate. (My dh’s company just spent some bucks hiring a firm to make sure their newco name didn’t translate to anything unsavory or negative in any of their operating countries…so that’s why this example comes to mind.)</p>
<p>When a person in Latin America says Nova referring to the car it sounds like ‘no va’ which means ‘does not go’. The only difference in spelling is that no va is two words.</p>
<p>Maybe this is apocryphal, but I have heard that the Parker pen company made a similar mistake in marketing their new, leak-proof fountain pen.</p>
<p>The English ad included something to the effect of :“Avoid embarrassment” ( an ink-stained shirt front)</p>
<p>The poor Spanish translation used what must have seemed to be an English cognate, embarazar, and ended up telling the Spanish speakers that, with the Parker Pen, they could avoid pregnancy!</p>
<p>remember my history, a process being done on rubber accidentally led to the vulcanization of rubber. Helpful accident, but I realize not exactly what you were seeking.</p>
<p>Another detail - the birth of the chocolate chip cookie. Baker forgot to melt chocolate to add to cookie dough. Chopped up a chocolate bar and added it to dough that was already made, thinking that the heat of the oven would melt the chocolate. It didn’t, and the rest is history.</p>
<p>Viagra started off as a med for hypertension (UK-92480) that didn’t do much better than nitroglycerin while it was being studied. It did have a side effect that Pfizer found another use for.</p>