391–400 of 439 posts
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The search for an ongoing revenue stream is one of the most destructive forces in the tech industry. It leads to some very customer-hostile experiences.
My fave is "subscription headphones": https://www.nuraphone.com/products/nuranow
But the remaining market is probably big enough.
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The problem is that not having a revenue stream is one of the most destructive forces to tech (or other) companies , and people like to keep their jobs.
Hardly. There are countless firms who built their reputation on and survived quite happily making durable products. You might find pages of their early products filling eBay and the like, still going strong. A few are still adhering to those built to last attributes, most have transitioned into "as cheap as we can get away with, but with our valuable brand and logo" as has most of the whole world, including those off…
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I think software broke economics in a way, since that was one of the only products which you could produce once and sell infinitely. No other thing on the planet you could do that with. All other things you need to transform something physical or spend time doing which results in a linear mapping between input and output. Digital goods (such as music, games, etc) do not count as independent things since they are impl…
I'd like to introduce you to some songwriter friends of mine.
Those all have a non-trivial cost of reproduction.
Now that music is just files, the marginal cost of sending a file down the network wire is proportional to its compressed file size, which is insignificant in relation to the cost of the human labor of creating a master recording.
Also, now that music is encoded digitally, all copies are (usually) perfect reproductions of the original.
What many people may not realize is just how long-lived a lot of farm equipment is. There will be tractors out there still working that are 75 years old and just keep getting repaired. Obviously the manufacturers would like to sell those farmers tractors more often than that or, in the very least, generate a revenue stream from existing hardware and honestly that's what I see a lot of computing in vehicles as being:…
The search for an ongoing revenue stream is one of the most destructive forces in the tech industry. It leads to some very customer-hostile experiences.
One is the VC/investor trap, where the primary unrealized motivation is actually just finding VCs that will fund some scheme to be the "next {insert hopes and dreams of boundless riches}", where far more often than not the winners are the cunning founders (Adam Neumann anyone?) and the VCs, with everyone else left holding the bag (Hello, WeWork starry eyed people that believed the predictions of alien visitation) if the effort can't be pawned off on someone else, or some "exit" to a corp in a kind of reverse defensive blackmail auction to snuff out or keep a competitive advantage from a competitor.
The other thing goin on here is that very predatory and pernicious and rent seeking nature you are directly referring to that seeks to constantly corral and rope in as many consumers as possible as the whole tech industry is rapacious in its lust to generate "ongoing revenue streams" through dependency or even (what used to be illegal) what amounts to predatory pricing and snuffing out alternatives by reaping havoc on the target industry and society. None of these tech companies should have been allowed to use this predatory pricing model to utterly decimate our economy as they have … Amazon, Uber, WeWork, etc. are just a few examples. At the very least it should not be allowed for public money (pensions, etc.) to be invested in companies that are unprofitable at certain ratios, e.g., over 1/4 of their existence.
One clear example comes to mind in Uber/Lyft and their wake of both immoral and illegal actions that have led to the utter collapse of the taxi industry through unfair competition, predatory pricing, and illegality. What we are now left with is a for-hire transportation sector that is now a far less competitive environment (Uber/Lyft compared to roughly 5-20+ taxi companies per city (Ignore the flaws of the industry that are irrelevant to the anti-competitive issue), but we are now also facing a collapse of competition on a far larger scale, essentially Uber/Lyft instead of literally tens of thousands of taxi companies just alone in the USA.
So what happens when the Taxis cannot keep up under the Uber/Lyft onslaught? Well, we know what happens, they use regulatory capture to limit and prevent competition and they start raising rates as they have and are doing.
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Hardly. There are countless firms who built their reputation on and survived quite happily making durable products. You might find pages of their early products filling eBay and the like, still going strong. A few are still adhering to those built to last attributes, most have transitioned into "as cheap as we can get away with, but with our valuable brand and logo" as has most of the whole world, including those off…
Could you give some examples of such products?
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You should get ~7 years of update. Here you can check: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?hl=en I think it should be more, but it's on par with MacBooks
Actually MacBooks get 6/7 years from when Apple stops selling them. In contrast, the timer starts as soon as the first Chromebook with that cpu is released. It was a nasty surprise when I found that out
> The measure adopted by the Nebraska Farm Bureau laid out specific standards for any agreement or legislation: > Right to Repair: Nebraska Farm Bureau supports the implementation of comprehensive right to repair legislation OR a negotiated written agreement between ag producers and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). This legislation or agreement must: .... > 4. Differentiate between repair (the restoration of…
The EPA has always had laws about environmental controls (whether people care about them is a different issue, however...), so it's not something any new laws should really need to cover.
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Well, he said “rational,” as in, how does Deere rationalize it. As far as I can tell, they’re just parroting the usual DMCA talking points… > John Deere declined to be interviewed but sent a lengthy statement outlining its concerns. The company doesn’t want people altering its copyright-protected code because, said director of public relations Ken Golden, “changes could lead to the unsafe operation of products, disru…
JD is on where near a monopoly on anything other than green paint. Mahindra, Case IH, Kubota, New Holland, and on and on are all equally available, and in most cases cheaper, alternatives that function just as well. We own both a Case and a Kubota.
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How does John Deere advocate for their position? Is it about protecting trade secrets or keeping the machines in better condition for possible resale? Or did they just stay quiet because they knew they were in the wrong? Whatever it might be, I'm sure I would disagree with it, but I'd be curious how they try to justify it. Especially when you're talking about farmers, who have an extreme DIY culture.
I know a common line for vehicles was basically: 3rd party parts (and service) can't be guaranteed to be to the same quality as 1st party parts (and service) which can cause extra wear and disruptions to other parts of the vehicle even if they're not immediately apparent. Since we can't control what part 3rd parties use (or level of service) we restrict repair to our licensed repairers (via drm, patents, custom tooli…
These arguments have been used before with cars, and they've been shot down.
What many people may not realize is just how long-lived a lot of farm equipment is. There will be tractors out there still working that are 75 years old and just keep getting repaired. Obviously the manufacturers would like to sell those farmers tractors more often than that or, in the very least, generate a revenue stream from existing hardware and honestly that's what I see a lot of computing in vehicles as being:…
I grew up on a citrus farm and I can tell you CAT equipment makes Apple look like an open hardware platform. Parts where unavailable to non dealers they used patents to stop aftermarket and where hostile to hardware hackers that fixed flaws in their design. This was all while they where mechanical. I cannot imagine what it is like owning a CAT machine now that they are computerized. I know my grandfather tended to st…
I see a simple solution here when some farmer gets stung by this: some company needs to make some really cheap GM seeds which exist only for the purpose of "accidentally" tainting the GM field next door, so that the owner of that field can get a dose of their own medicine.