Comcast in Court, AT&T Gets Greedy

raindr writes "The Detroit News has this article on how comcast is going after people with modified Cable TV boxes.These fines (170k) seem a bit much to me." They apparantly send out a "bullet" to deactivate modded boxes. In other coax news,Shynedog writes "Boston.com is running a story about AT&T broadband users in the Northeast who are complaining about the unfair price hike that has been imposed on subscribers who own their own modems. It the wake of recent customer complaints, AT&T has started offering coupons to offset the monthly increase, but only for the next six months."

Comments

Capitalism, in theory and practice

[Rogerborg]

In theory:

1. Offer a better product at a lower price.
2. Gain market share.
3. Spend the money on creating better and cheaper products.
4. GOTO 1.

In practice:

1. Follow the theory, burning venture capital money, until you have a significant number of customers tied in to long term relationships.
2. Decide how much profit you deserve, and set your prices accordingly. Every time a customer leaves (if you've been kind enough to allow them contracts that let them leave) crank up the costs to the remaining customers. The beauty of this method is that while it seems like only idiots would tolerate it, you just rebrand yourself as a "prestige service", and as long as you have one idiot left willing to pay your price, it works.
3. Offer a great package to new customers, and then as soon as they sign on the dotted line, begin a campaign of abuse in tandem with FUD until they become so beaten and cynical that they believe it's pointless even changing to another supplier.
4. Constantly cut back on staff while giving multi-million dollar rewards to your executives for their bold cost saving initiatives. Refer to this funelling of money from many purchasers to a few major stock holders as "stimulating the economy". And remember guys, get that money offshore as soon as possible, so that the evil IRS can't steal it and spend it on schools and hospitals!
5. Spend the money you save on telling your customers what great value for money they're getting. Anything left goes into a college fund - for sending the children of friendly Congressmen and Senators through college, of course.
6. GOTO 2, until your last customer leaves, or you spread your campaign contributions too thin and the DOJ, SEC or FTC finally point out that the emperor has no clothes on.

Overly cynical, or an honest assessment of how a system composed of a few huge imcumbents actually works in practice? Make your own mind up.