Useless products
19 Aug 2004I had an interesting product sample land on my desk today (in a fairly literal sense: I honestly have absolutely no idea from whence it came!), which can only be described as gimmicky in a moderately useless way.
It’s a mouse. Which is okay, in and of itself. It’s quite a nice mouse, as far as these things go: it feels slightly lighter than my existing A4 USB thing, it moves more smoothly (hey, it’s a newer mouse, it’s to be expected)… nothing spectacular, but still, very usable.
For your admiration:
“Ooooh.”
What is that red thing, I hear you enquire?
That’s what I’m wondering, actually. The packaging on this mysterious object advertises it as follows:
Labtec
Wheel Mouse
with Light
The word “Light” is in red.
Note that in this instance, “Light” does not mean “Optical Mouse”.
Observe:
You’ll note the presence of a futile red LED, as well as a black mouse ball. Wonderful!
The mouse itself is decent (hey, it was free, no complaints from yours truly), but really: this is almost as bad as iiNet’s false value-adding schemes! Ah well. It’s not quite false advertising, but the implication is certainly there.
I’ve seen 5-unit pricing of optical mouses at $16 in the last six months, so surely it can’t be that much more expensive to ACTUALLY manufacture the real product! I’d imagine these would go for about $11 retail/unit, and down to $7 or $8 for OEM dealers. It’s a measly $8! I don’t see how that’s worth risking the wrath of upset consumers who purchase your product in error, but maybe that’s just me…