Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Shopping’ Category

A long time ago my very first job was working on medical information systems and it’s interesting to see how far along such systems have moved since that time.

The world of electronic health records software these days is all about managing patient care effectively. No more mistakes through unreadable handwriting, fewer problems through prescribing medications that interfere with existing drugs that the patient may be taking and generally more efficient management of the practice. In general terms, a massive improvement in the quality of service that you offer your patients.

Having said that, it is scary to move from paper based systems onto entirely online ones and for that you need consultancy support during the period of changeover. You’ll never regret the move though!

Aside from technology men are pretty much useless in the shopping stakes but they’re at their lowest point when buying stuff for their significant other to wear.

To begin with it’s lingerie purchases that are almost always an unmitigated disaster. There’s just no way that they are going to get the sizing right as it’s far more complex than anything that they’d buy for themselves. Not only that, but, of course, they’re generally choosing something that is thoroughly impractical, aren’t they?

Even in other clothing though they’re none too good at selecting something that their wife or girlfriend would like to wear or would find all that practical. Even here the basic style choice that they’re generally aiming for is “sexy” whilst the wife/girlfriend is looking for things like “warm”, “comfortable” and “practical”.

To be fair the wife/girlfriend is just as bad at choosing a techy product for their man too 🙂

or, rather, the same perfume but at a lower price.

As always, the way to get this is via an online retailer like discountfragrance-online.co.uk who strip away all the expensive demonstrators and fancy chairs and provide you with the same perfume that you could buy in the fancy shops but at a considerably more sensible price.

Of course, in reality you don’t save that much money on such things but what you end up with is a much higher quality of perfume for your money. The only downside is that you can’t make it a last minute thing as you need to allow for a few days in the post.

It’s been a very long time since we had the opportunity to view how the use of a wide range of products changes when the price of them goes down.

Sure, we’ve been used to that happening on all kinds of electrical and electronic items with computers almost dropping to the fashion item price range (hence the arrival of colour choice recently of course). However, who’d have thought of that very same thing happening to something like eyeglasses?

That’s a product that’s historically been seen as involving highly trained opticians, expensive offices and skilled technicians which overall seemed very much like a recipe for high prices as far as you could see. Except that online retailers like ZunniOptical are changing all that with prices at the bottom end of the range (which don’t look like el cheapo glasses by any means) coming in for pretty much loose change.

Clearly when a product drops into that “loose change” price range from previously having sat well in the “fairly serious money” price range then there’s going to be big changes in how it’s perceived and used. For one thing, the concept of having a single pair of glasses purely because it wouldn’t be worthwhile to have more than one pair doesn’t hold any more. Thus, even at the lowest price there is heaps of choice and the opportunity to match your glasses to your outfit in a way that wouldn’t have been viable before.

I wonder what’ll be the next product that this will happen to?

Not so long ago just about every company manufacturing portable computers seemed to offer a whole raft of options with the basic model so you could have one or two batteries, or you could have a CD drive (’twas pre-DVD then) instead of one of the batteries or you could have…. well, loads of different things that probably served to seriously complicate the buying decision for most people.

However, these days the portable is very much a standard issue device with not a whole lot of uniqueness to really distinguish the products from different manufacturers. There still remains some specialism of course but mainly that’s severely limited so, for example, Sony tend to specialise in expensive multimedia models and, as always, Apple plough their own furrow in the marketplace. A year ago I’d have added that for a mini portable it was Asus but that marketplace is now totally swamped by offerings from the other manufacturers.

What’s missing from that sameness are the little things. For instance, I’m looking for a portable right now and would like to have an AV socket on it yet there doesn’t seem to be such a beastie these days and instead some have HDMI connections which are handy but it would have been nice to have been able to connect camcorders and whatnot that are only a few years old and don’t have HDMI. Likewise, I’d have liked to have been able to continue to use some PCMCIA devices but everyone seems to have moved on to ExpressCard slots now.

On the software front it’s nice to see that several flavours of Unix are on offer these days, notably on the netbooks of course in that it would seem pretty ridiculous to be spending far more to buy the wordprocessing software than it did to buy the computer.

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