Apple sues Polish grocery store over the letter A

Re:Apple sues Polish grocery store over the letter A by InclinedPlane on Tuesday September 11, 2012 @06:39AM (#4504682)

Exxon's marketplace is largely commoditized, which is part of the reason they act how they do, Apple's marketplace could not be more different.

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Re:Apple sues Polish grocery store over the letter A by burke on Tuesday September 11, 2012 @10:41AM (#4505648)

In particular, oil is a fungible commodity. Fungibility is the key factor here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility

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Re:Apple sues Polish grocery store over the letter A by mbesto on Tuesday September 11, 2012 @09:59AM (#4505410)

Personal computers aren't a commodity?

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Re:Apple sues Polish grocery store over the letter A by praptak on Tuesday September 11, 2012 @10:23AM (#4505562)

Nope. A barrel of oil from Exxon is undistinguishable from any other barrel of oil traded at the exchanges. This is not the case with say, Thinkpads vs Macbooks.

Quote wikipedia: "A commodity has full or partial fungibility; that is, the market treats it as equivalent or nearly so no matter who produces it." So nope, definitely not (yet) the case with computers.

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Re:Apple sues Polish grocery store over the letter A by lifeisstillgood on Tuesday September 11, 2012 @03:53PM (#4507468)

Yet oddly for more the case with "the cloud"

I am hopeful that openstack will give me a large range of providers I can use with the same Apis - and that my app design will be sufficient that even the remaining non fungible parts of a hosted computer (OS, connectivity, size of data stored) will be mitigated

I am not sure if it's a good or a bad thing but pretty soon every computer other than the ones I carry will be commodities

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