I read this analysis on what makes for an exceptional company, driven by data on thousands of companies over 45 years:  http://dupress.com/articles/pulling-ahead-versus-catching-up-tradeoffs-and-the-quest-for-exceptional-profitability/?coll=3655

The short (and somewhat obvious) answer - better "performance." Not lower prices. Performance can be sustainably differentiated over time. Price is denominated in dollars, the ultimate commodity.  The only way to differentiate on price is to make it lower, and all that's required to overtake you is a tweak in the cost structure and a swipe of then pen.  I'm vastly oversimplifying to point of idiocy, but in essence, in the debate between "more for more" and "less for less", the answer seems to be "more at some price point that allows you to re-invest in even more."

What should that price point be?  In a networked world, holding revenue constant, more users at a lower price point is better than fewer users at a higher price point.  Unless it's a true luxury good whose few users include the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Kanye West and Barack Obama.  Because it's better to have more free-agent ambassadors and reference points - it enables free credible marketing and PR, and potentially an ecosystem of hackers, developers, spinoffs, and feedback providers that can make your offering more valuable over time.  As Brad Fitzpatrick, founder of LiveJournal once said, "Having users is the key to getting contributors. More users find more bugs and find more use cases."

I would posit that often the answer is "more for about the same".  "More for about the same" is a dominant position from a price standpoint.  It is net better than "more for less" and enables more network- and ecosystem-driven opportunities than "more for a lot more".

The critical questions become - "What can your cost structure support, and how much cash flow do you need to re-invest?"  "More for about the same" might be "more for slightly more", but it still comes down to the affordances of your cost structure (or what your cost structure could be).  Apple, for instance, has a shockingly better cost structure than its competitors, which enables it to make money from both ends - by charging higher prices as a luxury good and by constraining costs.  And even Apple is finally dropping the price on their iPhone:  http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/apple-cheaper-iphone-low-150045949.html

Perhaps, rather than a sign of weakness, it's a sign of greater dominance to come.  At the end of the day, it will depend on what they're going to do with their pile of cash.

I have a job where frequent travel is a prerequisite, yet travel is so astoundingly wasteful. You're constantly in hectic transit, standing in line, taking off jackets, spending money on planes and taxis - it's substantially expensive for you to be dramatically less productive. And god forbid something goes wrong - missed flight, bad weather, lost luggage etc. Then you're just screwed.

So I've been thinking a lot about why I have to travel, whether we take it for granted the value of "in-person", and if there's an opportunity to close the gap, push out the performance frontier.

I recently saw in my Facebook feed a debate on whether investors should hear pitches over Google Hangout or some other virtual means. One of the responses was super interesting - in essence, he said his team found out that the remote team thought the presenting startup founder was significantly more arrogant than the local team. He recommended virtual pitches only if you already knew the team.

Why? Why? What makes that difference? Why does it matter that you're in the room?

Is it that we don't catch the facial nuances so are left to interpret only the more dramatic gestures and expressions we do see?

Is it that we can't smell their pheromones and emotion indicators, and therefore are missing important data in our analysis?

Is it that we haven't shaken their hands and felt a sense of kinship from the ritual and biochemical stimuli resulting from skin touching skin? 

Is it that we can't see their faces at a scale that our brains interpret as human, and therefore feel less empathy?

I could go on and on. We know that trust is about information, and that it's very difficult to build trust without meeting someone at least once. There's something in that live interaction, that if we dissected it and understood it, maybe we could build technology that did more than just solved the problem of seeing the same slides and hearing the same voices - or even seeing the same faces and co-authoring the same document - to create an experience where I feel like I'm in the same room as you.  So I never have to get on a plane unless it's going somewhere with ocean and white sand.