Midterm available and follow up to ultraportable discuss and hotel assignment

Hi Class:

Those of you that made the WED call – thanks for attending.  On Sunday, I will plan on calling the following: Heather, Rachel, Marcus and An, and if any others would like to join us for the Q&A, please email me.

For the midterm, it is now posted in the blackboard “Assignment” section, for the week 7 assignment.  It is due Nov 30^th, and sorry no extensions.  Same goes for the finals, which will be due Dec 15^th.  In addition to reading the Southwest Airline case, I would recommend another reading that is already in our class google cabinet, click here – “Defensive Marketing” by MIT Prof Hauser.  However, you should be able to answer all the midterm questions based on the case without further research or other material. 

I really enjoyed the class discussions that you have all participated in – thank you Marcus for getting us started on the ultra-portable discussion.  As a follow up, I would recommend reading “Innovator’s Dilemma”, click here for the business week excerpt.  I think the laptop producers underestimated the entry of the netbooks and their cannibalization of the existing laptop market, hence the ultraportable market got overshadowed by the introduction of the netbooks.  As you will learn from “Innovator’s Dilemma”, companies and managers tend to continue to move up the price/performance curve, and forget or ignore the lower margin/lower end products that tend to disrupt and change the entire market.

For the hotel assignment – again, great job all of you.  As a follow up, Ideo lab has a good write-up about how they re-designed the Towneplace Suites:

http://www.ideo.com/work/featured/marriott/.  I also like how some of you picked up on the social aspect of the long term stay experience, here’s some additional research Ideo worked on to redesign the Courtyard lobby: http://www.ideo.com/work/item/redesigned-courtyard-lobby-experience/.

That’s all for now, Kelly