Relevant Costs and Benefits
This CNET video covers Microsoft’s Phone division closure and reasons for its failure. Just a few years earlier, Microsoft paid billions to acquire phone maker Nokia. However, customers were not purchasing the phones and the division was losing money. Microsoft identified the purchase price of Nokia as a sunk cost, and rightly closed the struggling division.
This short clip describes the process of starting with cow milk and ending with whey protein. As Whey protein was once a discarded by-product of Milk production, producing and selling whey offers dairy companies an incremental revenue source.
Outsourcing
NASA is now using Boeing and SpaceX equipment to send astronauts into space. In the last several years, we have seen NASA begin to outsource the development of rockets and other space technology to private U.S. companies. This is because these companies can launch rockets at a significantly lower cost than NASA, in part due to lower overhead costs.
Segment Elimination
Bloomberg’s contributors discuss GE cutting 12,000 jobs in its Power Division. The video discusses how GE is cutting certain positions, likely representing avoidable costs for the company, and repurposing other positions, possibly unavoidable salary costs due to contract stipulations.
Pricing Decisions
This video describes some of the techniques Amazon uses to set prices. Although managerial accountants likely do not write the code for the algorithm, they certainly direct the company as to what factors to include in the algorithm.
CBS anchors describe the factors that possibly went into Starbuck’s decision to raise prices a few years ago. Due to increasing costs from higher rent, wage increases, and rising material expenses, Starbucks felt it needed to raise prices to maintain its targeted return on investment (ROI).