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Transportation The Almighty Buck

Why Didn't Sidecar's Flex Pricing Work? 190

Posted by samzenpus from the you-get-what-you-pay-for dept.
Bennett Haselton writes Sidecar is a little-known alternative to Lyft and Uber, deployed in only ten cities so far, which lets drivers set their own prices to undercut other ride-sharing services. Given that most amateur drivers would be willing to give someone a ride for far less than the rider would be willing to pay, why didn't the flex-pricing option take off? Keep reading to see what Bennet has to say.

I live in Seattle, and nobody I know here has significantly changed the way they think about getting around in the city, as a result of Uber or Lyft. Of course it's more convenient to open an app on your phone and press a button to summon a driver, than to call a taxi company and wait on hold until an operator picks up. And it's reassuring to see a little dot moving across a map on your phone screen showing you how far away your Uber driver is, instead of staring out the window and wondering when your cab is going to arrive. But on price, UberX and Lyft are about the same price as a taxi or less (UberX being the cheaper version of Uber), and sometimes more during "surge pricing" periods. It sounds hip to drop a reference to "taking an Uber" instead of taking a cab, but when cost-conscious people need to get somewhere, they still drive themselves or take a bus, just like they always have.

So I was noodling about writing an article suggesting that a ride-sharing company should try to grab all the market share by implementing a "set-your-own-price" model, which would allow drivers to name their own price for how much they would charge to take a rider from A to B. I even had a specific company in mind: Sidecar, sensitively referred to as the "forgotten stepsister" of Uber and Lyft, should up-end the came and challenge the titans by undercutting them on price. My reasoning was simply that if I want to travel from my house to a location 30 minutes away, a cab might cost $30. But if anybody close by (with a reasonably modern car and safe driving record) can compete on price to take me on that trip, I could probably find someone willing to do it for $10. And with Sidebar not being able to compete with Uber and Lyft on funding or marketing, what have they got to lose by trying a game-changer?

So, beginning of an article sketched out in my head, only to find... that Sidecar has been doing this since February. And nobody noticed. Well, apart from some guy named "Richard Branson", but he hasn't been getting the word out. (All right, be honest: If I hadn't told you that this was an idea backed by Richard Branson, and went with the original article saying it was just my suggestion, would you already be composing comments in your head about what another half-baked Bennett Haselton idea this was?)

So why didn't it change everything? Why do none of my friends talk about "grabbing a Sidecar" to downtown or to the airport?

Well, trivially because there are fewer Sidecar drivers than Uber or Lyft drivers, but that just begs the question: Once a preferable (cheaper) option existed in the form of Sidecar, why didn't more users start trying it out, which in turn draws in more drivers to serve those greater numbers of users? This is the standard textbook economic prediction of what should happen. And while the real world doesn't always follow textbook economic predictions, it's a little surprising to see the reality this far off in this case. A competitor offered a service 50% cheaper than the leading brands, and nobody noticed.

Driver-set pricing has another advantage, which is to blunt criticism of "price-gouging" during periods of high demand. Economists have long puzzled over why Apple and Microsoft don't charge more for their new gadgets, since as long as people are lining up to buy out the stock, sellers could raise the price and still be assured of selling out completely. Various theories abound, including that the act of raising prices would create too much resentment that would cost the company more in the long run. This seems to be the case with Uber, which has long been the target of sarcastic jibes about its "surge pricing", and which was charging four times its standard rate to transport people out of Sydney during a hostage crisis, before the company reversed course after an outcry and offered free rides to passengers trying to leave the city.

Now, most economists would say that raising prices during periods of high demand is what suppliers should do, for various reasons. First, you're going to be providing the good/service to somebody, so by providing it to the people willing to pay the most, you are at least making an effort to provide the service to the person who needs the most. Second, the widely publicized high prices will draw more suppliers into the marketplace to meet the demand, which helps bring prices back down (the standard "surge pricing" notification in the Uber app tries to make this point: "Rates have increased to get more Ubers on the road"). That means even if you're an altruist who planned on burning all the money that you got from driving during "surge pricing", you're still doing more good for the world by charging the highest rate the market will bear. (If you're still feeling guilty about all that extra money, you can donate it to charity rather than "donating" it to your customers by offering them below-market fares.) But I've never heard of a company successfully fighting off charges of price-gouging, by making the economic argument that they were doing the right thing. Usually they just don't engage in a discussion at all, or they cave like Uber did.

But with driver-set pricing, companies could say that they have nothing to do with the sudden price hikes. That's your driver gouging you! And then the driver could justify it to the rider by explaining -- truthfully, in at least some cases -- that they were in the middle of doing something else, when they suddenly got the alert that they could make extra money by providing rides, and it was only because of the high price point that they could justify interrupting their work to come out and drive. By putting it in these personal terms, the drivers would essentially be imparting to their riders the aforementioned economic lesson, the one that no company has ever tried to explain to its customers when it's the company itself jacking up the price. (Although, I expect this would create a new running joke about ride-share drivers: during surge pricing, everybody claims that they stopped whatever else they were doing and came out to "help meet demand", even though some of those drivers must be liars who were already out on the road when the surge hit.)

But in most cases, driver-set pricing would be cheaper than the standard fare set by Uber or Lyft. So why didn't the cheaper option take off? Maybe Sidecar underestimated the disadvantage of only being rolled out in 10 cities -- because Uber and Lyft are deployed in far more markets, they also get name-dropped in vastly more news stories and pop culture references, so even Seattleites won't know what Sidecar is if they only hear about ride-sharing services on TV. Maybe people taking Uber and Lyft rides are consciously or subconsciously trying to be trendy, and there's no point in using the less popular alternative. (Hipsters, on the other hand, now there's a marketing opportunity -- "I'm using this really obscure ride-sharing app, you've probably never heard of it...")

But I think the simpler answer is that the free market is just not the meritocracy that people think it is, or that it's portrayed to be in textbook economic exercises (which would predict that Sidecar should have captured 100% of the market by now). People use what they've heard of, and if a critical mass of influencers happen to talk up a particular product or service at the same time, that gets the snowball rolling, so that still other users will be attracted to the product or service because of the large numbers already using it. Whether the product is objectively "the best" has little to do with the outcome. In a plausible parallel world, Sidecar could have captured more of the initial buzz purely by accident, and led the pack with its flex-pricing model, and now we'd all be talking about Richard Branson's brilliant move that "shook up the industry."

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Why Didn't Sidecar's Flex Pricing Work? More

Why Didn't Sidecar's Flex Pricing Work?

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  • Duh. (Score:1, Funny)

    by Squash ( 2258 )

    It didn't work because they didn't get a Slashvertisement soon enough.

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Literally every comment, including this one, is complaining about ol' Benny's worthless post. It's about time to take a hint, slashdot: nobody gives a shit about Bennet's puerile drivel.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Richard_at_work ( 517087 )

        You mean some selfish posters are ruining certain articles for others, who don't particularly mind if Bennett Haselton posts or not...?

        If you don't like him posting, SKIP OVER HIS FUCKING POSTS. No one is requiring you to click on that link to read his post, SO DONT FUCKING DO IT.

        Coming in here and posting drivel because you dislike him and his is nothing more than you thinking you own this fucking place and your opinions matter more than everyone elses - its as bad as the bullshit "bring back classic" pos

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by ganjadude ( 952775 )
          its not about disliking him or not, its about the clear abuse of slashdot by this one person trying to use the site as their personal blog.

          If people want to read his stuff, there is a section in the site under the user name that allows him to write his crap, and his friends to see his crap.

          He could actually post useful info, but the abuse is what is turning me off and i would wager many others

          • its about the clear abuse of slashdot by this one person trying to use the site as their personal blog.

            Slashdot itself started as Rob Malda's personal blog.

            If people want to read his stuff, there is a section in the site under the user name that allows him to write his crap, and his friends to see his crap.

            And for each journal entry, there's an option to post it as a submission. Or do Bennett's journal entries skip the submission queue?

            • Rob Malda's personal blog.

              Rob Malda's blog was more interesting, that's the real complaint. He did a good job of separating the wheat from the chaff. Articles like this one reduce the usefulness of slashdot, which was always a monoculture that ignored significant, but off-topic developments elsewhere.

              Uber is technologically noteworthy due to how they are using technology, I think they get a bit too much air time, but it's interesting to see the taxi industry get shaken: they are relatively poor and survi

              • This, however, is clearly a post about business models and the economy, or I assume it is, tl;dr The business side of technology is irrelevant to my interests, business is just a bad reality TV show.

                I am an economist and this drivel is more like, "what I think I recall based on having taken econ classes a long time ago" than it is about economics or business. I would never endorse any of the above logic attributed to economists, with the possible exception of the first day Apple pricing which I would talk about simply in a college class even though actual economists know full well why a company might use that pricing model.

                News flash: what's taught in college economics is known to not be correct, it's

                • News flash: what's taught in college economics is known to not be correct, it's just part of a liberal arts education.

                  whaaaa? if i wanted to be wrong, I didn't have to go to college for that! srsly tho, do marginal costs equal marginal benefits? cuz I've structured my entire life around this single idea.

        • Re:Duh. (Score:4, Insightful)

          by ottothecow ( 600101 ) on Monday December 15, 2014 @12:55PM (#48601515) Homepage
          I think it is a two-fold issue.

          First, most of us think Bennett is an idiot and simply don't want to read his drivel. Slashdot doesn't provide an easy way to ignore his stuff (although other users have written greasemonkey scripts to get rid of him). If he posted comments like that, I personally think that he would be moderated away. If stories were subject to moderation, I think the same would happen. If this were reddit, his posts would never see the light of day.

          Second, and more importantly IMHO, is the issue of why is Bennett special? Slashdot links to articles. With the exception of things like ask-slashdot and posts about slashdot itself, everything is cited to an external source. RTFA is a thing, because usually there was an actual article with content. Why does this Bennett guy get to use slashdot as his personal editorial platform? He should have to post this on his own person blog, just like everyone else. And like everyone else, I believe it used to be frowned on to self-promote to slashdot. If you want your articles to show up on slashdot...write good articles and hope other people post them. I 100% believe that if he was posting this stuff on his own blog, it would either not get submitted at all, or the editors would reject it. It simply doesn't meet the quality standards of slashdot (at least the quality standards that there *used* to be). If the articles aren't good enough to stand on their own, why does this post-Dice slashdot feel the need to give this guy a soapbox to stand on?

          Slashdot will probably never be what it used to be...but Bennett's crap is one of the most noticeable things that numerous long-time users absolutely hate. The articles often hook you in with an interesting prompt...but the writing is terrible and you soon realize you are reading a moron's rantings. This isn't an ad-hominem attack--I don't reject his articles because they are written by him. I usually don't notice it is a Bennett piece until I am halfway through reading it and say "Oh man, this is terrible" only to look and realize that it is another one of his poorly thought-out editorials which has been given free web-hosting and promotion by slashdot. Every single one of them is bad. If he were to write a decent piece (and preferably post it elsewhere with just a summary and a link on slashdot), I wouldn't complain. But they are all *awful*.

          • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

            by smellsofbikes ( 890263 )

            I'm (in a more civil way) with the GP: the distaste for Bennett and the vitriol in the comments feels like people driving across town to picket a porn store, when they could just stay home and not buy porn.
            But your post -- "I usually don't notice it is a Bennett piece until I am halfway through reading it and say "Oh man, this is terrible"" -- makes me realize a lot of people read Slashdot differently than I do. I see Bennett's name before anything else, like this big BLINK hashtag, and know what I'm going

            • I don't get a "read more" link. How can I get that so that I don't have to page down many times before I can see the comments. The only other things on slashdot this long as the in depth movie and book reports, which I also wish were just links to another website.

              I didn't care about Hasselton that much before, but recently he's been showing up with terrible regularity.

              Some of this is frustration over the bait-and-switch I think. We see what looks like an interesting subject in the RSS feed, then when we

          • Stop clicking, stop commenting.

            As it is, Dice is getting a kick out of these replies.

            Also, how long is your reply? Too long. I look for the factual correction, where Bennett didn't read the literature first. Now I'm going to point out that you are the problem. Don't click, don't comment.

            • Did you even read my comment?

              I click because the headline interests me and I don't immediately recognize it as a Bennett post. He often picks interesting topics, but his actual responses are awful.

              I comment because I choose not to just ignore it. Sure, I could install a greasemonkey script to eliminate Bennett, but that is not going to help slow the downfall of slashdot. I comment because I want to make sure Dice knows that there is public opinion that doesn't want this crap. I comment so that any ne

          • dude, lots of hate, but I don't see YOU offering solutions for distributing ice at burning man! maybe instead of trying to tear down others you should work to solve the world's problems one by one.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

          You must be new here, complaining about TFA is the reason most of us come to Slashdot...

          Seriously though, the lack of a filter option and the fact that any worthwhile content is invariable lost in wall of textual diarrhoea are quite annoying. If Bennett could learn to condense his ideas down by about 95% and get his own editor tag so he can be filtered out easily people wouldn't mind for the most part.

          This is supposed to be "news for nerds", not Bennett's personal blog. Unless you are going to argue that po

        • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

          by Opportunist ( 166417 )

          DON'T YOU DARE keeping him from posting!

          Not that I would miss his drivel (actually, I never read a word), but the comment section is more fun to read than the cartoon page of any newspaper there is!

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by u38cg ( 607297 )
          That's what we have moderation for. Also, fuck Bennett.

        • All of this Bennett Haselton hate sure make me miss the Jon Katz hate.

          Wait... nevemind. I don't miss it.

        • No one abuses slashdot as much as he does though. No one else turns slashdot into their private blog service.

          Every other poster typically has a short summary (as this article does) which is then followed by a link to a longer article on some other site. However in this case the short summary is followed by an extremely long article in-line. Why is Hasselton exempt from the editing that other posters are given?

          And people do not know in advance if they're getting rickrolled by Hasselton or not. We don't s

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by Darinbob ( 1142669 )

        Aren't there web sites other than slashdot that lets someone post their blogs rather than having to run their own servers? If not, someone should create one, and call it something like "the spot for blogs" or "blogspot.com" for short. Then we can isolate blogs in their own niche of the internet separate and distinct from the news part of the internet.

  • Just to make one thing clear: (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 15, 2014 @11:52AM (#48600877)

    I did not click on "read more" to read what Bennet has to say.

    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      by Cro Magnon ( 467622 )

      I clicked on "read more" to see if any of the 100+ comments were something besides complaining about Bennet. :-P

  • Opinion columnist? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by hawguy ( 1600213 ) on Monday December 15, 2014 @12:06PM (#48601011)

    Why is an opinion column being presented as "news"? There's nothing here to suggest that any research or study has been done, it's all Mr. Haselton's opinion of what he thinks is happening. Either stop branding yourself as "News for Nerds", or stop running opinion columns under the guise of "News".

  • Supply and demand (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NewWorldDan ( 899800 ) <dan@gen-tracker.com> on Monday December 15, 2014 @12:07PM (#48601017) Homepage Journal

    What an idiot. He spells out the whole thing but can't see the big picture. Sidecar is hampered by a lack of drivers. Drivers are making more money on Lyft and UberX, so that's where they go. And those companies also have better marketing departments so they get more business. It's really not that complicated.

    • Pretty much. You can get more money doing X, so you do X. This is why free markets raise prices above the minimum when competition is hot, instead of doing an infinite downward spiral.

      In negotiation, we use a tactic of carrying about public standards of fairness to negotiate. This is why I argue for a repeal of minimum wage: once we've instituted a Citizen's Dividend, a minimum wage becomes a tool for hiring managers to pin all basic labor jobs to a published figure, which increases the belief that t

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rwa2 ( 4391 ) *

        Plus, there's plenty of alternatives in the Seattle area. Most tech workers get a monthly bus pass for free through their work. Since Seattle doesn't really have a "major" mass transit network yet, the bus service it actually pretty good (as long as you're commuting to/from Seattle -- good luck if you're trying to commute between suburbs). The city of Seattle paid for everyone to get Car2Go memberships, and ZipCar has a pretty good presence here too. The airport shuttles are great if I have more luggage

    • Price equilibrium is the hallmark of capitalism. The thing that people often miss, because of how much government interferes with pricing models is that Supply will meet Demand at a price point that makes sense for the economics to work. People like the author have almost no experience looking at Econ 101 style supply demand graphs, so they have no idea how economics really works.

      Eventually, Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar will all be priced about the same, for the same kind of ride. Sidecar is interesting, because

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by plopez ( 54068 )

        There are quite a few assumptions there including the fact that a free market will spring up without government intervention. Actually the post did make a good point in that economics is never that simple. We do not live in an economics 101 universe. Supply and demand curves are unrealistic in that they do not take into account competition, captured markets, shortages of raw material, labor shortages, lack of capital, disruptive technologies, and they assume instant information exchange. Econ 101 is about a

        • upply and demand curves are unrealistic in that they do not take into account competition, captured markets, shortages of raw material, labor shortages, lack of capital, disruptive technologies

          Supply / Demand curves do explain all those things. The problem is, there are so many intersecting supplies (labor, goods, capital) that it gets very complex very quickly.

          and they assume instant information exchange

          No, actually they don't require instant anything. The only assumption is, that information is known eventually. Those that have access to more information can make better buying/production/selling choices and be more efficient. The whole supply / demand thing is not about maximizing profits, or lowering costs or anything else like that. It

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by plopez ( 54068 )

            "it gets very complex very quickly."
            Which is part of the point. There is no quick easy or straight forward explanation. You can look at it from a modeling perspective as just an optimization problem but the number of factors and the fact that many of the factors may have feedback loops that practically speaking appealing to simple curves does not do a good job of explaining the observed phenomenon. The is more going on that simply some n-dimensional saddle point.

            "The only assumption is, that information is

    • Don't mess with the convergent point of the Supply and Demand curve!
      If you try to price outside of of that area. Too much or too little things just don't work well.

  • Because... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rodrigoandrade ( 713371 ) on Monday December 15, 2014 @12:07PM (#48601019)
    My life is more important than saving a few bucks by allowing a stoned 16-year-old to drive me around town in a rainy night.

  • Why Didn't Sidecar's Flex Pricing Work? (Score:4, Informative)

    by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Monday December 15, 2014 @12:14PM (#48601103)

    >> Why Didn't Sidecar's Flex Pricing Work?

    Because they hired Bennett Haselton to promote it, and the target audience died of thirst waiting for BH to finish his pitch.

  • Economists... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by gnasher719 ( 869701 )

    Now, most economists would say that raising prices during periods of high demand is what suppliers should do, for various reasons.

    In the UK, a few years ago they had a "petrol strike" where drivers refused to transport fuel to petrol stations. Panic ensued. One owner of a petrol station who still had fuel left decided to double the price.

    Three days later the strike was over. Two months later, the station closed down, bankrupt.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by TWX ( 665546 )
      Economics is Machiavellian, in the sense that when one is in a position of power, one can use that power for one's advantage to the disadvantage of others, but one must understand that the others one harms will remember being harmed and might choose to harm in return. There are consequences for one's actions.

      Is there a price-point where raising it doesn't raise the ire of those wanting fuel? Possibly. Did this gas-station owner hit that point? Absolutely not. As a consequence his customers chose to
    • Odd that people resented the gas station so much -- suppose the situation had been reversed, and a sudden surplus caused the market price of gasoline to drop. Would drivers have paid extra at the pump to help out the poor gas station owner? :)

      • No, because all stations would have been on the same playing field. When one player decides to behave with especial assholiness, then, yes, people will remember that.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by 6Yankee ( 597075 )

      Yeah, I remember that one. The petrol in station was way the hell out in the middle of nowhere (for the UK, anyway), and was already on the expensive side as a result. The owner said that he wasn't profiteering, rather it was about conserving what little they had. Until they could get another delivery, he wanted to ensure that anyone who wasn't desperate didn't stop there, and anyone who was only bought enough to get them to civilisation.

      Made sense to me. Didn't make sense to the Daily Mail, of course.

  • I know someone, above, said "Hey idiot... it's about the lack of drivers!" I'm not going to even attempt to speak to that, because I don't know enough details to know if Sidecar's business model would attract "enough drivers" or not?

    Off-hand though, I do know I've taken shuttle buses before where the driver only accepted cash and charged around $8 to drive me to an airport from a hotel, and he didn't have more than 1 or 2 other passengers when I got on the bus. So that tells me that yes, some people will

    • I hate to give any answers when Bennett has already provided several pages of answers to his own question, but...

      It failed because success has nothing whatsoever to do with the business model, or economics, or novelty, or any of the things that people traditionally tell you matter. It failed because someone else had a similar product but with better marketing. The hype drove that industry, not issues of economics or convenience. Once Uber become the fashion then everything else was destined to lose.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by King_TJ ( 85913 )

        That's arguably true... I think your point has a lot of merit.
        I don't think it's the whole story though.

        Uber is "trendy", without a doubt. But people still only use it because they have a real need to get from point A to B. I think people like to do that at the lowest possible cost, as long as we're talking "apples to apples" types of transportation. (You might well pay more to ride in a car than take a cheaper bus that gets you to the same place, but that's because of all of the disadvantages of using

  • nc (Score:1)

    by Falos ( 2905315 )
    lawl, he thinks consumer purchases are exclusively inextricable to the objective merits of a product/service, and results are a direct reflection of said merits

    allow me to break that illusion:

    "apple"

  • Simple (Score:3)

    by adiposity ( 684943 ) on Monday December 15, 2014 @01:56PM (#48602099)

    It didn't work because drivers quickly realized they would be forced down to the lowest price that someone was willing to pay, and they can make more working for Uber.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by bennetthaselton ( 1016233 )
      Right, assuming that rider demand never switches over to a lower-priced option, it's obvious why drivers would prefer working for Lyft or Uber. The curiosity is why the marketplace is so inefficient that rider demand doesn't switch over to the lower-priced option.

      We have a widget marketplace where widgets cost $1 to make, and Lyft and Uber are charging $10 each for widgets. Sidecar is trying to undercut them by selling widgets for somewhere between $1 and $9. In an efficient marketplace, a price war sh

      • Maybe the drivers aren't interested in being the commodity that's pricing is in a race to the bottom, though.

        • I'm sure that's true for most of them, but if only some of them were interested in competing on price, that ought to be enough to start a price war. Surely there must be some drivers out there who are willing to drive for 75% of what UberX drivers are making. If they're not able to grab the business though by undercutting on price, then that suggests the market is too inefficient.

          • This assumes that passengers are willing to put up with waiting a lot longer for a Sidecar driver (of which there were always fewer) instead of paying a little bit extra and getting an Uber driver very quickly. They're not; Uber wins this one every single time. There's more drivers (in the four cities I've used it, I've never waited more than 5 minutes for a ride), and contrary to the drivel in this blog entry - "UberX and Lyft are about the same price as a taxi" - bullshit. Uber, at least, is waaay che

            • Initially of course many people would prefer a more expensive Uber ride that arrives sooner, but in an efficient marketplace, there should have been some people who would wait an extra 20 minutes to save $20, on, say, a ride to the airport. Then as the number of Sidecar drivers increased to meet that demand, the average wait time would be lower, thus roping in a few more potential customers who would be willing to wait 10 minutes, thus creating demand for more drivers, etc. The problem is that even among
              • There's two problems with this theory - 1:

                there should have been some people who would wait an extra 20 minutes to save $20

                According to who? Maybe there weren't any, or the amount of people was small enough to where it didn't matter. "Should've been" is pretty arbitrary.

                The other problem is that you still need drivers who are willing to take less for making the same trip. If drivers are making more with Uber, and there's plenty of passengers available, you have a chicken-and-egg problem: Drivers won't move to Sidecar because it pays less, and passengers won't move to Sidecar because

  • Poorly applied economics (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Ugh, the lack of knowledge regarding economics in this article is shocking. I won't hit all of the issues, but these two stood out:

    Economists have long puzzled over why Apple and Microsoft don't charge more for their new gadgets, since as long as people are lining up to buy out the stock, sellers could raise the price and still be assured of selling out completely.

    I don't know what "Economists" are being referred to, but no one I'm aware of puzzles over this. Electronics such as phones and game consoles are a highly competitive market. Sure, people may line up at release to buy an XBox, but a game console has a multiple-year life cycle and the lines only happen the first week at release. MS is playing the whole life cycle, and people

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