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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.
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.
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.
"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.