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Silicon Valley Values Shift To Customersploitation
theodp writes "Bill Davidow is the real Silicon Valley deal. Commenting on how Silicon Valley has changed over the decades, Davidow is not impressed, dishing out harsh words for Facebook, Apple, Google, and others. 'When corporate leaders pursue wealth in the winner-take-all Internet environment,' concludes Davidow, 'companies dance on the edge of acceptable behavior. If they don't take it to the limit, a competitor will. That competitor will become the dominant supplier — one monopoly will replace another. And when you engage in these activities you get a different set of Valley values: the values of customer exploitation.'"
come on - give me a break.
Customerspliotation? Are you fucking kidding me? Blogosphere was bad enough. Internet, stop making up stupid words.
-SaNo
The incentive to create a business is to make money. Once your market saturation crosses a tipping point, the only way to further increase profits is to exploit, rather than serve your market. So you engage in monopolization, rent-seeking, and so on.
This is how business has always worked. This is an entirely predictable outcome of basic human nature. It should not be surprising at all. Nor, for the most part, should it be upsetting. We should simply expect that once the businesses get huge like this, we will have to either break them up or heap some government regulation on them in order to protect ourselves from them. We will *always* have to do this, so, let's get busy.
My first reaction to this article was a wry smile" "I think I've heard this story before." I spent 30+ years working in IT on Wall Street, and saw that industry change from relationship-oriented to a almost complete focus on short-term transactions. ("What have you done for me today?") IN both industries, there is a good deal below the surface that isn't visible, easily or at all, to the customer; that the customer often ends up getting screwed shouldn't really surprise anyone.
How are the exploited if they are signing up willingly? Trying to negate personal responsibility and play it off on the "evil corporation" is more played out than the buzzwords Davidow uses in his "blog."
I agree companies take things a bit too far at times but like a wise man once said "It's a crime to let a sucker hang on to his money." I feel no worse for people being "exploited" by these companies than I do the banks that gambled on them.
I'm not sure that's a good comparison. What you describe is simple competition...supply a cheaper product that gets the job done and get that business. What he's describing is quite different. Actually the use of the term "customer" in this whole context seems a little grey to me. These companies real "customers" are the ones paying for add revenue, not those being exploited.
This is why we have internet bubbles. If you try and cheat your way to the top, the people will simply shift away from you. If value is non-existent in a service or product, the people will not buy it (even if it's free). If you keep fooling them, eventually there will be nobody left with money to fool, or the ones you fooled will ignore future false promises. Millions of Facebook users don't realize they are working for Facebook but not being paid, because Facebook earns all it's money based on the information those people provide, freely (including private messages).
When the negative behavior is revealed to everyone, we tend to just pull the plug. For example, I deleted my Facebook account because of their shady attitude towards privacy. For a while it looked like Facebook would continue to dominate social. But social has become very anti-social; ads, over-stimulus, email nagging... etc.
THE PROMISE
I will pull the plug on anything that turns out to be false. Invest in false companies at your peril.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
No, PCs caught on, because their computing power and extensability was enough to fulfill a special need centralized systems weren't fit for: Doing your own spreadsheet at your desk, writing something to be edited heavily later, playing some games, combine arbitrary software adapted to your ideas how to work or recreate. The whole notion of "personal computing" was diametral to the centralized IT shop with the big irons serving multiple terminals. PCs weren't eating into IBM's or DEC's revenues. Only when the PC technology was mature enough to make inroad into the server business, the game was changed. But at that time, tens of millions of PCs were already sold.
nobody is forcing you to use facebook, google, twitter or any free internet service. i use them because i get value out of them.
oh noes, facebook knows i liked the page of some women's perfume my wife likes. its so evil the perfume maker may even send me a custom coupon before my wife's birthday because they will have her info as well.
Some people at slashdot look at Apple and it's walled garden app store and feel like Apple is creating a trapped audience who can only download what Apple feels is OK.
And they are right. But some people who want a simple "it just works" device are willing to accept that model and they don't care about concepts like open source.
I'll extend that to many of IT professionals who have spent years getting the dreaded "my computer is broken" phone calls. They have pointed friends and family in Apple's direction because... it's just works.
Grandma doesn't build her own kernel. She doesn't see a walled garden. She sees a device that works without throwing a ton of alarming messages at her.
This is in no way similar to, say, my telephone number being sold or traded by businesses to telemarketers.
This isn't new, and this isn't unique to IT.
The more I think about, the more impressed I am by the Craigslist model. There is no constant addition of features just for the sake of appearing to do something or for the sake of growing revenues. That's a service that is truly focused on its users.
my father in law is a millionaire and he never uses facebook. in fact he rarely uses the cheapo laptop i bought him. i know other successful people who don't use facebook. some have accounts but never use it, others don't even have an account.
"Nothing! Because if I take it to small claims court, it will just drain 8 hours out of my life and you probably won't show up and even if I got the judgment you'd just stiff me anyway; so what I am going to do is piss and moan like an impotent jerk, and then bend over and take it up the tailpipe!"
-- Fletcher (Jim Carrey) "Liar, Liar"
Different scenario, same outcome.
Nobody forces anyone to go to work, stop at red lights, wear clothes outside, or the like either.
Actually the police do (other than the going to work part).
If I want to listen to Spotify or other services, guess what? They use FB for their access.
Actually they don't. I have Spotify fully disconnected from Facebook.
Something for nothing.
Napster simply provided exactly what the consumer had been demanding all along and what was native to the enframing of digital technology itself: copies of data, for free (or nearly free). Something for nothing. A customer would have been much more wary of such a proposition, but consumers are like honey badgers, they don't give a shit.
So, as interesting a lament as the article is, in fact, it points at large issues it cannot address (customer v. consumer) and also the disappearance of HP and its way of doing business. My wife worked at HP for 25 years, so I have some insight on this as well. The HP way started to collapse in the 1990s and took a BIG hit in 2001 with Carli Fiorina's incompetent reign at HP 1999 - 2006. She and her cohorts dismantled HP and the HP Way part by part, and basically gutted the company. Now it is basically a subsidiary of Compaq, even though it's called HP, most of the important decisions are coming out of Texas, not Palo Alto. I remember hearing back in 2000 how the HP way was under attack and people lamenting the "good old days" at HP. I think the article has a lot of that nostalgia clouding its view.
How we get out of the infinite regress of infantile consumerism remains to be seen. I am thinking that when oil production goes into a permanent decline after 2017, that's going to evacuate a lot of wealth that was being pissed away on meaningless junk, and people will have to snap to attention and get on the stick or experience enormous suffering. At that point, the ICT industry will evolve customers and relationships. How that will evolve out of the massive monopolisation process from above seems unlikely, so I would think it will have to come from below as consumers empower themselves back into being customers working with companies to get (work/play/etc.) done, and then become citizens who are compassionate and contributing active members of a society instead of taxpayers griping about "the gubmint".
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
When times get tough, you find out what people are really like. When you're living in times of plenty-for-all, it's easy for people to be kind and generous. The truly good, nice people won't change much, if at all, but the rest? The pretty mask and the kid-gloves come off. Businesses are run by people, and they reflect who those people really are.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Huh?? PCs were around before the IBM PC, although they were called "microcomputers" back then. The IBM PC was a hit because IBM designed and manufactured it, and the mantra was "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". IBM pretty much wiped out every other microcomputer manufacturer except Apple after that, for almost ten years when Compaq cloned IBM's BIOS and produced a faster, more full-featured, cheaper PC that would run all the programs IBM's PC did.
IBM PCs never locked customers in with support contracts and being the only source for spare parts and upgrades, and in fact there were a whole lot of companies selling memory, hard drives, video cards, etc. for it. These spare parts were always commodities, and as soon as Compaq came along you could put an IBM board into a Compaq and vice-versa with no problem whatever.
You're confusing their PCs with their mainframes, which do lock customers in with support contracts and being the only source for spare parts and upgrades, but so did every other mainframe maker.
In short, you're 100% incorrect, kid. Ask your grandpa first next time.
Free Martian Whores!
In a better world, we're more than just slightly smarter animals. More and more that's all people seem to be, is animals.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
You are a marketable data point. That's all. You're not their customer, or even their consumer. You're their unpaid intern, creating content for their benefit, so that more marketable data-points join the hive-mind.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
while I agree Facebook, Apple, MS and others are just about making money, Google isn't.
Google has been about making products for people. some have been miss, and others have been a great hit. Sure, they make money from Advertising, yet before them, search engines sucked.
They made a phone OS that is a big success, yet they aren't charging phone manufactures a tax to use their OS or another phones OS. Can you say the same about MS?
Look, I might get labled a Google fanboy, but all of the companies listed in this article, they are the only one who seems to actually care about their customers and the products they are working on.
Be seeing you...
Oh for fuck's sake.. I wasn't being nostalgic, damnit, I was being theoretical!
Humans are capable of some pretty amazing things.. but they're also capable of some of the most senseless, animalistic, disappointing things imaginable. What I was referring to was a theoretical human race that actually rises above the stupid animal they tend to be!
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!