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Target Corp. (NYSE: TGT) has started selling a Blu-ray disc player for what is probably the lowest retail price you can find one at: $229. I've said many times in the past that this new format will not catch on with consumers until retail prices routinely get to less than $200, so this new price from Target is nearing that mark. Of course, panicked U.S. consumers probably won't be buying any Blu-ray players the remainder of this year as they watch what wealth they did have evaporate in the markets.

The Target model is an Olevia brand player (yes, that's an off-brand), which marks a $70 reduction from a recent Sony Blu-ray player that is being sold alongside the Olevia player for $299. Still, unless there is some breakthrough difference that Blu-ray manufacturers and retailers can market correctly, most U.S. consumers will stay with their progressive-scan DVD players that sell for $75 or less and have a perfectly fine picture (although not true high-definition).

So, perhaps sometime in late 2009 -- roughly a year from now -- the market will see $99 Blu-ray players and regular consumers may finally feel the urge to buy one and start re-purchasing their movie libraries in yet another format. That is, until super-duper, high-fidelity Purple-ray players hit the market sometime in 2014 and the cycle repeats yet again. Perhaps by then, we'll all be out of this economic funk and won't be protecting our cash hoards, however little they may be by then.

Sprint Nextel Corp. (NYSE: S), even as it loses hundreds of thousands of customers, continues to pay its executives astonishingly high salaries and overall pay packages. This according to analyst group Glass Lewis & Company.

Top managers at the telecom company were awarded pay valued at $74 million in 2007, even as the company saw massive customer defections to the competition and was preparing to toss out former CEO Gary Forsee in the process. Sounds like some recent AIG shenanigans, doesn't it? No wonder Main Street no longer trusts Wall Street. Although corporate compensation abuses are almost the norm recently, it's amazing shareholders don't stand up and scream when companies not doing well are lavishly rewarding management.

Of course, Sprint spokesperson James Fisher defended his employer by stating "It's very important to consider that 2007 was a highly unusual year because of compensation that was paid to an exiting CEO, as well as sign-on compensation paid to a new CEO ... we had significant other severance charges for executive changes during the year." Severance charges -- for a management team that ran the company into the ground. I guess all those contracts signed by incompetent management were too hard to bypass since shareholders can't blow holes in those golden parachutes.

Best Buy, Inc. (NYSE:BBY ) is staging a marketing event to deploy two "store brand" laptops that will hopefully address two major complaints of laptop PC buyers - weight and battery life. Of course, this has been the argument for portable PCs for over a decade. The two new laptops are manufactured by Toshiba and Hewlett-Packard Corp. (NYSE: HPQ) and will be sold under the faux brand "Blue Label." This name probably signifies Best Buy's official corporate color more than anything.

Of course, both laptops will retail for $1,199, a hefty price for anything but a high-end retail laptop PC in 2008. If Best Buy is going to price these at $1,200, it better darn sure hope that there is something revolutionary about these two models. Specifically, a battery life increase of at least 50% under normal operating conditions, as well as at least 1.5 pounds less in weight than comparative models that cost half as much. A pound is hugely significant in the laptop PC weight arena -- but Best Buy needs to go beyond that for such a premium price. Agree? Disagree?

Although Best Buy is marketing these as designed by "customer feedback," there's nothing earth shattering here. Battery life and weight have always been at the forefront of wants and needs from the laptop PC consumer. Manufacturers have seen fit to continue making their wares compete with features and aesthetics more than what customers have asked for, such as Apple, Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) who clearly gets it. But the Windows PC world? Not so much. Will this be another empty promise or a half-hearted marketing move? We'll see once these two models hit store shelves and customers actually start using them.

Ford Motor Corporation (NYSE: F) will see its Volvo Car division shed 3,300 jobs as the American automaker continues dealing with a huge slowdown in sales in the U.S. as well as other global markets. The auto industry is not in a death spiral at the moment (although it's been described that way), but expect the largest restructuring of one of the largest industries ever in the last 50 years. Ford will help lead the way, unfortunately.

Volvo announced that 2,700 of the positions will be eliminated in its home country of Sweden while 700 additional positions will be cut globally. The company said in a statement this week that "to meet the rapidly deteriorating market situation in the global car industry, the management team at Volvo Car Corporation has decided to initiate further structural changes in all parts of the business." That is light language for "the sky is falling."

The Swedish company will also get rid of contracts with 700 consultants. As it makes these cuts, they can't be the last, I'd expect more announcements in 2009 from Volvo as well. Consumers continue flocking to vehicles with smaller prices, smaller engines and larger MPG figures. Volvo, which makes great cars, just doesn't have the product mix to fit that description. That is the price for inflexibility not only in the U.S. market, but for all global consumer markets that are under extreme duress at the moment. Everyone hopes it gets better soon, but your guess is as good as mine.

If you're a Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) user, you probably enjoy the relatively high quality of the company's products at t cost of -- zero. How does Google give all this away for free, you ask? It's the same as any other company on the web that features quality products at no cost. The cost is your privacy. You are paying, and paying big.

Do you mind? It's hard to say what kind of personal, financial and psychological profile Google has on millions of its customers, but you can believe that this massive marketing database exists. How Google manages this will be the most important decision in the company's young, decade-old existence, but the question remains: do many of us sell our souls for freebies? Every time you sign up for something free but fill out a complete demographic profile to get it, you're selling out. Google is doing nothing different -- but its scale is so huge that all this data controlled by one entity does cause for concern among the informed consumer inside us all. It should, anyway.

Google, like anyone in business who is savvy, knows that giving away products or services for "free" on the front end is made up for on the back end. In other words, would you rather pay for every single product or service you use and not have any entity know how to market to you -- or would you rather get a good majority of your products and services at no cost but with the attached condition that there are many entities out there that know you better than you know yourself?

More importantly, they know how to push your exact buttons to have you behaving like a robotic consumer or a slot machine junkie? With the U.S. consumer responsible for two-thirds of economic activity (as little as that is at the moment), the harnessing of this kind of power becomes clear. Okay, I'm off to perform a Google search...

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT) has not followed the trend of blue chip stocks that have seen 20% losses in the last few months along with the broad market. Indeed, WMT shares are up from just over $46 per share in January to over $56 per share today. WMT shares hit $63 just under a month ago, so yes -- they are down since September.

So, what's going on? Why were Wal-Mart shares downgraded this week? Sentiment from the downgrade states that Wal-Mart is most likely not immune from the continuing economic situation in the U.S. (and worldwide, of course).

Prices will continue to rise, unemployment may get worse and growth may stall (of wait -- those are all already happening). When this happens, what do consumers do? Why, they flock to Wal-Mart, of course. The haven of low prices becomes a hideout in turbulent economic times, and the stock market must agree after looking at WMT share price trajectory in 2008.

Will Wal-Mart weather the storm? To a point, it already is. Sure, all retailers are expected to have a dismal holiday season this winter, but Wal-Mart will do better than the competition. It has more stores, more pricing leverage and more wherewithal to hold customers hostage with lower prices and inventory turns at a time when it's needed most. Perhaps we'll see WMT return to the $60/share level by Thanksgiving -- if not sooner.

Google, Inc.'s (NASDAQ: GOOG) YouTube continues to take the lion's share of the online video market. Although startup Hulu.com -- which will broadcast the U.S. Presidential candidate debate live tonight -- has come on strong, YouTube has it. Everyone from teens with $69 digital cameras to professional videographers are uploading video footage to the site.

Google announced recently that it was upping the file size of uploaded video to the site as well -- by a factor of 10. Going from 100 Megabytes to 1 Gigabyte per uploaded video is amazing in and of itself, but this will make YouTube all the more attractive to those who want to take rather exhaustive video and upload it for all to see while not being constrained.

For example, five minutes of video on a standard digital camera (just an average, of course) will easily eat up 100 Megabytes of storage. Since we're not all video compression experts, Google -- with this change -- has just allowed its online video universe to expand in a huge way.

In addition to the video file size increase, YouTube's new uploader will allow multiple file uploads at the same time. This is also a rather large change from the "upload and wait" scenario of the past. Although Google surely wants to make more money from the massive amount of video viewed every minute on YouTube, giving regular customers the ability to have larger videos (and several at one) uploaded should just push it that much further in front of the online video pack. What it needs now is to lift the 10-minute limitation for non-partners. But then again, that would invite a whole new universe of copyright piracy. Maybe.

InterActive Corp.'s (NASDAQ: IACI) search engine and information portal Ask.com continues to try and re-invent itself to compete more heavily with search leader Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG). With Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) being such a large distraction over this past summer, the time seemed appropriate for Ask.com to try -- again -- to take some steam from Google. From anyone, for that matter.

It still won't happen. Here's why: Google's search product still is compelling to all that use it, even with marginally better search products. Google also has its hand in news, email, documents, spreadsheet, blogs, etc., and continues to recruit the customer that uses Google for everything possible on the web.

Its main product is search and that also provides almost all its revenue. But how can Ask.com compete with something like this? A better product, faster search results, or a more intuitive experience won't cut it any longer. What Ask.com would need is a disruptive product to even think about competing with Google. It's been over a few years since I've written on Ask.com's foray into competing with Google. In many ways, it's superior. That's, unfortunately, no longer enough.

Is Ask.com trying to win a losing battle? Perhaps. When Ask.com CEO Jim Safka says that Ask.com can recruit web searchers from Google with a 30% speed increase in search results, he's deluding himself. I'm not sure where that research came from, but Ask.com may be on its last stand. The search engine is pulling in ad revenue from the use of its products, and it may be content to grow steadily in that arena for the time being. But if it really wants to attack Google's ad revenue cash cow, something completely innovative and fresh needs to be forthcoming.

Welcome to the 79th installment of The Wal-Mart Weekly, a column dedicated to bringing you insight, wit, facts, results, opinions, and just a bit of everything else when it comes to a very hot topic these days: Wal-Mart.

This week, let's take a look at how Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) may be trying to re-invent itself in some markets with a newer, smaller store format. Wal-Mart has dabbled in smaller stores before (like the Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market), but in general, they've been limited in product selection.

These newer launches, though, may be a competitive response more than Wal-Mart testing the small store format yet again. These new locations are marketed with the name "Marketside." They have no marketing connection to the Wal-Mart brand at all. This is indeed a difference, as Wal-Mart looks to be leveraging its immense retail power with a completely new brand. Can it work?

Sirius XM Radio, Inc. (NASDAQ: SIRI) is making good on its promise to make several programming alternatives available to customers after swallowing rival XM Radio back in July.

While SIRI shares sit below $0.50 today as the Dow plummets yet again, the company's newest radio plans are aimed at increasing subscriptions. The new plans are aimed at letting customers have more choice by purchasing programming from both the Sirius side, as well as the XM side.

Looking to boost its revenue and number of subscriptions, Sirius XM Satellite Radio Inc. Thursday announced a range of new programming options that lets subscribers buy programming from both of the recently merged rival services. The "Best of Both" plan actually tips the scales at $16.99/month, which is over $4 higher than the normal $12.95/month subscription. But, that amount does give all XM subscribers to ability to hear Howard Stern while giving Sirius folks the ability to hear Oprah's satellite show.

But the big news is this: a new $6.99/month plan will allow customers to ability to choose 50 "ala carte" channels from either service. That's what many of us having been waiting for: we may only want a few channels but don't want to pay for all of them. If you've been on the satellite radio fence for a while, will you jump on board now for less than $7 a month and get your fix? You won't get Howard or some live sports without additional fees -- and only certain radios are supported -- so be prepared.

Best Buy, Inc. (NYSE: BBY) is ditching the warehouse-blue store format that it's grown famous for. Well, not really -- but in some newer stores in Denver, that cheery blue is being supplemented by earth tones and skylights as the largest consumer electronics chain in the U.S. sets its sights on the female demographic. That's right -- the anti-gadget crowd who rolls both eyes when guys start salivating over that 50-inch flat screen television.

Women do have a huge (indirect) impact on consumer electronics sales, although the merchandising most retailers push definitely fits the male buying persona. So, instead of the gray, techie feel where those large flat-panel displays generally reside, Best Buy will be placing some (if not all) of those televisions into staged rooms that look like a set from a typical home. What a better way to visualize that new purchase than by seeing how it looks in the real world, right? Ever sold a home and staged it to sell? Same thing.

Best Buy even asked 40 local female customers to work with its employees to help them form ideas. In other words, merchandise your products in a way that makes them comfortable to be around and use, not as cold hard hunks of steel, plastic and chrome. Serving the needs of women shoppers better is a perfect way to grow sales in this economic state (if that's even doable) -- Best Buy certainly has the right idea here. There's nothing better than involving your customers in decisions that affect how they purchase, right?

Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt has sung the praises of many things in the past: consumer experience, mobile product offerings and even Google's philanthropic efforts. At the same time, Schmidt has made sure Google has evolved into a ruthless competitor that has really blindsided the internet marketplace in so many ways so fast that it caught most of us off-guard.

But can Google seriously save the world? Although tech pundits sometimes state that in tongue-in-cheek fashion, Schmidt is dead serious about it. Google's massive global infrastructure requires a ton of energy to operate. As we all know, energy costs are not exactly low. Although newer Google data center sites are chosen partly for cheap energy proximity, that's not enough. The company wants to fix the energy problem in the U.S., and they have a plan.

According to Taiwan's CENS website, T-Mobile USA will sell half a million of the Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) G1 smartphone built by Taiwan's own HTC and sold exclusively (so far) by T-Mobile USA. Although that's not up to par with announced Apple, Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone 3G sales, it's no slouch expectation either.

When the G1 phone is released for sale on October 22, that leaves just over two months for that projected sales figure to be hit. Although the unit will cost a relatively paltry $179 with a two-year contract, can T-Mobile USA really hit that sales number? I have severe doubts, although T-Mobile USA will easily be able to start competing with established players like Apple in 2009.

Although Apple has an entire year headstart over rivals like the G1 and the Samsung Instinct, there are many customers who want the novelty of a touchscreen smartphone but don't want to be locked down into the Apple ecosystem -- even though it works very well and would serve most customers 100% perfectly.

But then again, Apple's first-mover advantage and its incredibly powerful marketing muscle may just keep it floating above the likes of the Google-powered G1 for quite some time. Google's efforts with the G1 could make it a second-tier player here while Apple dominates. That is, unless, T-Mobile USA starts off quick with half a million in unit sales this holiday season and never looks back. What is your projection?

Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) will now be offering about 2,500 movies from the Starz movie channel as streaming video from its website. As Netflix continues to dabble heavily into internet-delivered content to complement its DVD rental business, the company really has taken the lead on ensuring it builds its brand to deliver content through whatever means. Once the DVD becomes obsolete (and it will), Netflix's positioning will put it in front once again to give its customer base content through whatever means.

Netflix's "Watch Now" selection of immediate content has grown in recent months, but regular customer complaints about lack of selection have streamed in at the same time. This partnership with Starz should change that a bit. Right off the bat, Starz's "Starz Play" lineup will contain hits like No Country for Old Men, Superbad and other recent hits. Can Netflix convince studios to release movies at the start of or during theatrical release? That would be a major coup -- but that's quite a paradigm shift for the movie studio industry as well.

All the new Starz content will be available at no cost to current Netflix subscribers as well -- which is a major selling point if I've ever seen one. The more partnerships Netflix can forge with device manufacturers, gaming console leaders and content providers, the better. And, it may just keep giving Blockbuster executives fits as well, while Netflix CEO Reed Hastings sighs in relief.

No wonder Sprint Nextel Corp. (NYSE: S) is losing customers fast. The third-largest wireless provider in the U.S. announced a new "MyMoneyManager" program last Thursday that sounds like the nicest thing for your Sprint phone since sliced bread. The only problem is this: the new downloadable application meant for your Sprint handset lists compatible Sprint cellphones that looks like the "who's who" of the Sprint handset lineup from sometime in 2007. Umm, Sprint: it's October 2008.

This is the kind of thing that not only makes Sprint subscribers confused and angry, but gives a terrible PR black eye to a wireless company that has lost hundreds of thousands of customers in the recent year. Sprint should work hard to announce new applications that actually are meant for and usable by its current product lineup -- not from outdated models that are not even for sale any longer.

The reason customers have not embraced using applications on their cellphones is due to the "works there/doesn't work there" framework that the wireless industry just can't seem to figure out. Unless it's universal across a product line, why even bother? Sure, there are several wireless phone manufacturers and models, all of which are different. Add to that the protectionist tendencies wireless providers have and it's no wonder why consumers find it hard or impossible to do things on these technologically-advanced phones that marketing departments want them to. With examples like this, it'll never happen. Can you hear me? Good.