I was helping my uncle purchase a notebook recently. His needs are simple a computer that allows him to surf the web, read emails and pretty much do some general word processing. I browse around and quickly decided Dell was the rational choice for him since it was around 600 USD for the lowest model (in Singapore)
However, right before I ordered, I decided to look around at the local Yahoo auction site. I saw a couple of Lenovo going for sale; being a fan of IBM, I looked at the specs and found them way superior to the Dell I was looking at. The price wasn’t too bad either since it was one of those deals whereby people re-contract with the local ISP Singtel for like 30 months and then get a notebook in exchange. It was something like 300 USD off the retail price
The whole thing got me thinking about the ways our new economy works. Some folks are willing to sign on a dotted line with a company for service bonding them to a long term contract and in return sell/hawk the freebies they get for cash at below retail levels. Kind of like getting an instant loan from a bank. On the other side of the coin, you have someone like me who saw an opportunity to pick up something which I need for lesser than retail and thus everyone ends up as the winner.
Not quite so, supply and demand dictates the rational behind the actions above. However it does cut out the middle-man or the actual retail shops. With the world production increasing shifting to places like China; countries such as Hong Kong, Singapore and other developed nations are forced to look at service to pick up the bulk of growth.
With the already high cost of living, service such as those in finance can flourish if there was already an established base. Yet, continual innovation and extra service is required for Singapore and Hong Kong to retain this middle-man role. Like my example above, with the ease of communications, people will bypass and go direct. That is an inevitable fact.
