Appliance-makers are built to profit from that one, rare purchase, focussing their marketing, customer research, and internal financial analysis on brief, sporadic, high-stakes interactions.
Last week, the Fed said it would make new purchases, focusing on bonds backed by mortgages.
The World Health Organization and some countries have focused instead on more limited purchases, focusing on people who are likely to be exposed in the event of an epidemic.
These Gulf states do not share a border with Iran, and their arms purchases focused on expensive warplanes and complex missile defense systems.
QE purchases focused on safe assets might have an ambiguous effect on the economy: boosting asset prices through portfolio balance effects but limiting lending growth by sucking up the supply of good collateral.
It also recently dropped its paid for business model, switching to a freemium app model to wrong-foot the competition, with a plan to monetize its keyboard software via in-app purchases focused on user customization, such as keyboard themes.
Instead of identifying those customers most likely to make a purchase, they focus all their efforts in pursuit of anyone, anywhere.
Whereas occasion platforms tend to be based on one-time annual events, arranging merchandise displays for specific purchase situations focuses on recurring or persistent shopping contexts.
While last week's purchase was focused on data and machine learning, and understanding how performance affects the overall business, today's is firmly focused on Cisco's collaboration side of the house, which includes WebEx and Spark.
