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Can you profit by serving early adapters?

Berkonomics

It did not hurt that Apple always seemed to trump the competition in design of the product and the product’s user interface too. Management added a few new rules to the rule base and watched over the system each evening, anxious that there be no contest between this number-crunching wonder and a single manager’s intuitive guesses.

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It is satisfying, but rarely profitable, serving early adopters.

Berkonomics

After all, what company can maintain such a small number of unique systems? I turned to Tom, our chief programmer, and directed him to use as many of the features of the knowledge based (artificial intelligence) system as possible, but reprogrammed into our standard reservations module using our BASIC programming language.