None of these will ever have a consumer buyer.

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If this is Microsoft's play for the mainstream consumer smartphone buyer, they've got a pretty big boulder to push uphill.

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Value obviously will vary from consumer to consumer, meaning one thing to the minivan buyer and something quite different to the luxury sporty car buyer, for example.

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There is little evidence of that, with residential real estate sales collapsing once the home-buyer rebate plan expired, retail sales, consumer confidence, and manufacturing slowing even faster than economists can revise their forecasts.

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Tom had been a buyer at Urban Outfitters, while Walter worked in consumer marketing.

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This extensive lineup is tailored to meet the needs of virtually any large screen TV buyer, best positioning Sharp to meet the increasing consumer appetite for larger screens.

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Even when a resourceful buyer uncovers this information--it is available for a price from Consumer Reports, FightingChance.com, and others--there is only so far a dealer can be pushed.

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Mohanbir Sawhney, professor of e-commerce at Kellogg School of Management and Steven Kaplan, at the University of Chicago Business School, argue in a recent article that the value created by business-to-business hubs, where every buyer and seller can potentially link with every other, vastly exceeds that of business-to-consumer models where there are lots of buyers, but just one seller.

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