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Has anyone seen the Bose "informercial"? They expect their potential customers to actually experience what their products sound like through a televised commerical!

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Not too different from HDTV infomercials on VHS tape.

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Decent stereo, for VHS!

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I never wanted one, and for the prices that I've seen, I'll never own a Bose Wave® radio.

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My father bought a Wave Radio with CD for his country house. He loves it. My father is precisely Bose's target market. He has more money than sense and he doesn't want to be troubled by hooking something up.

So a couple of years ago he bought one for me for my birthday. As it arrived at my office at a time when I didn't have a home, it lives at the office. As an office radio and CD player it shines. But I don't love it. I still use my 25-year-old GE clock radio at home to listen to NPR in the morning. I have never felt the need to swap them.

There is no way that the Bose Wave Radio with CD is worth $499. If portable CD players are selling for $49 in blister packs at Best Buy and clock radios are $25 at Walgreen's I figure that Bose has $20 in parts in the Wave and $40 in cute industrial design. So what they are selling for $439 above their manufacturing costs is exclusivity and a name.

Henry Kloss took great pleasure in his later life debunking the Bose myth. He created Cambridge Sound Works to under sell Bose and then he created the new Kloss Model One radio which is now sold through Tivoli Audio .

What Bose's genius is marketing. He totally controls the retail end of his product so he can set the price. In doing so, he has created a small monopoly. But it isn't illegal because obviously you can buy a similar clock radio elsewhere. Apple tried this same approach but it didn't work for them as well because people just started buying PCs instead. But Bose doesn't need a percentage of market share to be successful. He just needs a steady stream of people willing to pony up $499 for a $60 clock radio.

Notice too that in the 10 years the Wave Radio has been out, it has never been improved. What, technology hasn't marched on in 10 years? Apple couldn't survive with the same model for 10 years; even Sony has to update the televisions occasionally.

I love Bose's concepts, I just hate his execution. He really knows what people want and he delivers. There is a segment of the population who don't want bells and whistles and pay dearly for it. Then there are people who will pay $10,000 for an amp and $50,000 for a pair of speakers because it has a thick aluminum faceplate and are polished using the spit of the Phoenix. I always have to laugh when I see speakers at my local high-end audio store that cost 10 times what I have behind my screen. That's sort of why I gave up lusting after high-end audio systems. There has got to be a better way.

Sorry, I didn’t mean this to become a rant.

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*falls over*

Ian, Henry Kloss has always had a table radio someplace in his many companies. KLH made the forst high end table radio back in the KLH/Henry days. I remember it was around 300.00 back then and that was alot of dough.
Mark