Exactly. During the August 2002 blackout, my area was without power for a day and a half and cell phones worked just fine. Even the paging networks were still operational IIRC. I didn't even think about how they were powered at the time!
I agree with you fully. The merger should not be allowed if it will have anti-competitive consequences, and the track record of the DOJ should make this so, as they tend to err on the side of consumer protection in mergers cases.. it's actually one of the main standards that they use to judge any potential anti-competitive effects.
Deregulation of long distance services has led to price decreases in several countries. In Canada, we don't have deregulated local service yet, but we do have deregulated long distance, and there was a similar effect at its inception. These structural breaks are important movers of prices, and what I mean in the quote is that, outside of such structural breaks, price reductions are generally pretty rare.
But the good thing is that large price increases are also just as rare. I doubt that "the" phone company will re-emerge in terms of its ability to exercise market power.. the DOJ wouldn't stand for that for very long.. it kind of makes a mockery of their processes. It would be in the firms' best interests to keep rates around the same levels less they face some sort of disciplinary response. TFA mentions some regulations as a condition of the merger.. I'm sure that there are provisions in there saying that they shouldn't abuse their market power and that they should sell their networks to competing local carrers (CLECs in the lingo) at a specified markup so as to prevent any lessening of fringe competition.
Yeah but let the US firms fight the big boys -- Vodaphone, O2, the Asian carriers, etc. -- and watch the sparks fly! These guys definitely have the capital required to enter and the reputation required to back up their entry.
You're absolutely right in terms weakened competitive pressures in the face of the bigger mobile-to-mobile pool if they offer free in-network calls, etc. Especially re: free in-network calling -- it's amazing what can be achieved when you remove the carriers' ability to charge each other essentially neutral access fees. Maybe someday we'll get there!
A lot of what I've said in this thread relies on homogenous Bertrand pricing.. the effects still exist in a differentiated Bertrand model, but this is why I keep saying price/quality ratio. It's banking services and ABMs.. you're willing to travel an extra mile if you can get significantly lower transaction fees.
As far as cellular coverage goes, I can't belive some of the horror stories I continue to hear about bad/no service in relatively populated areas.
we're now crossing over into the subjective question of value:)
If there was no downward pressure on rates, then we would have seen price increases in cellular services after the cingular/aws merger a few years ago and, more recently, the nextel/sprint merger. Downward pressure does not necessarily imply a drastic reduction in rates.. in the loosest sense, it means a weak cap on prices.
As well, nested in that assertion is an assumption that landlines and VOIP are perfect substitutes for cellular. They are not. As hetergeneity increases, the downward pressure weakens. But that does not mean that downward pressure does not exist. As I've said in another post, a given consumer would find cellular a much less attractive option if rates doubled overnight. They have not.
Price reductions in and of themselves are generally pretty rare outside of IT. People all over the place seem to think that they should get salary raises and capital owners seem to think that they should get good rates of return... this is the nature of business. Wasn't it Einstein that said that compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe?
A technical note.. in the "potential for market power from vertical integration" part above, it's actually more than just potential. A vertically-integrated firm in a homogenous market where other providers are also vertically integrated has an _incentive_ to not exercise market power (e.g. markups lower and approaching 0 as the homogenous goods become identical). By keeping markups lower, they can price lower and thus profitably take more customers from their competitors. Again, this lower price has to be profitable by definition or else the markup was 0 before the price decrease.
Cingular and VZW may have their hardware on the same physical tower, but they operate incompatible networks -- VZW is CDMA, Cingular/AWS is GSM -- so you still need to duplicate the costs in the hardware.. same thing as how you can't take a VZW phone and sign up for Cingular service.
T-Mobile and Cingular may share towers and hardware as they both operate on GSM. That would be a better strategy, but they may still have their own separate hardware.. one would expect some coordination problems there. Further, a lack of consolidation in cellular services lowers the buying power of these firms when they're buying the actual network hardware from the upstream firms.
And beyond that, they are still running their own separate services with their own separate overheads, their own separate sales and marketing, their own separate layers of middle management, etc. There's still plenty of scope for efficiencies.
This is an issue of market definition, and I assure you that in the anti-trust investigations that the DOJ will be doing, such similar products are definitely considered for inclusion in the same anti-trust market. A quick link from the Canadian anti-trust people (I couldn't find a good quick US equivalent, but the guidelines are VERY similar): http://www.competitionbureau.gc.ca/internet/index. cfm?itemID=1714&lg=e. Look for the part about the hypothetical monopolist test.
The key point here is that such concentration in one mode of the transportation network is not sufficient for such a merger to have anti-competitive effects. As long as there are at least two firms offering service in similar modes into one network (e.g. VOIP, cellular, and landlines all being "phones"), any exercises of market power would be squashed by competition. I mean, you might not like the sound quality of VOIP or your local cellular coverage right now, but you would enjoy it a lot more if landline access fees went up dramatically, just as you would if the prices for VOIP or cellular fell dramatically.
I'm unfamiliar with internet access markets in the states.. my ignorance, and you make a good point. In Canada, we have essentially two dominant broadband providers. One provides via cable and one uses DSL. Again, this is a multi-mode transportation economy and you see the effects in the pricing of the services -- the firms have nearly identical price/quality ratios. There is a competitive fringe that supplies (broadband) service for a bit cheaper, but you tend to get reliability issues with them (i.e. the price/quality ratio is probably pretty similar).
I would think that cellular services would tend to equalize across carriers regardless of how many carriers there are (as long as there's at least two). Again, this is a homogenous product*, and given similar service levels, I can't see rational consumers flocking to the carrier with higher rates. This gives each carrier the incentive to cut their rates by a small bit to gain more customers, assuming it's profitable on the margin (and if it isn't, then they're already pricing at cost!).
I haven't read nearly enough on the telcos wanting to filter VOIP data. I'd agree with you that it's probably a bad idea/anti-competitive/waiting for a wrist slapping:)
* I realize that it's not quite homogenous in terms of the hardware that the carriers offer.. e.g. at least for BlackBerry, you see new GSM BlackBerries before you see new CDMA ones.. while this may provide incentives for people to switch from one to another, I can't see why you would switch carriers just because you have to wait 6 months for your preferred incremental product improvement to come along.
But vertical disintegration leads to double marginalization if there is market power on different layers... e.g. the tower owners get a markup on their leases to the cellular companies and then the cellular companies further mark up their costs. If the cellular companies own the towers, there is the potential (emphasis on potential:) for markups in the total delivery for cellular service to be lower. There are definitely areas where vertical restraints/competition across different layers of production are a good idea, but, if we're trying to get the best efficiencies from the merger, the vertical integration isn't terribly bad here.. we don't necessarily want two (or more) providers of towers since that's what we're trying to eliminate in the first place.
Your agriculture example is spot on, but it's because the farmers have no market power. And you are definitely right to fear consolidation in agriculture.. there is nothing scarier than having the delivery of a necessity in the hands of an unregulated firm with market power! (Of course, that's how the states runs their health care, so..:)
The prevailing thought in the anti-trust/economics literature is that consolidation is generally regarded as a good thing in cellular..
Basically, there are massive density economies in delivering cellular service (e.g. it's better to use a higher percentage of the capacity of one expensive tower vs. having four separate expensive towers running at lower utilization rates), and as such, there are efficiency gains that can come out of such mergers. We're more likely to see continuing consolidation in national cellular markets with a much bigger space for international competition. The companies want to move forward with consolidation, and the anti-trust authorities aren't really standing in their way.
In the US, the anti-trust people really only care about post-merger consumer prices (rather than the increased profitability of the merged entity). The degree of substitutable goods and the nature of price competition in cellular markets seems to keep downward pressure on rates. This is why they are letting all this go through.
As for VOIP (and the greater economy), you only need two firms to get good competitive results from these types of goods. Landline phones and VOIP are essentially homogenous products, and as such, it's perfectly logical to assume that people will go with the firm that offers them the best price/quality ratio. Outside of collusion, odds are good that you will see competition putting downward pressure on prices in landline telephony even if both landlines and VOIP are delivered by monopolies.
Things have changed quite a bit in the 26 years since the breakup. Back then, you either paid Bell's rate or didn't have a phone. Now there are much better substitutes (cellular, VOIP, etc.) and the potential for international competition which should serve to keep a cap on the amount of market power that monopolistic firms can exercise here.
I'll agree with you there -- my experience with the entire TSupport program was that it wasn't very good. The fact is that they want you to pay to get elevated automatically... not necessarily a good customer service practice.
Anyway.. I actually asked that question to folks in the tech side.. and their entire reasoning is that in 1999 (and arguably right now), the majority of their install base was running either Exchange or Notes as their email platform.. thus, in original design, they considered tight interoperability as critical to BB's success. That and MAPI allows pretty tight integration between Exchange and the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. (With BES 4.0 they added groupwise to this to support a larger base of government clients.)
BB started in the late 90s and their initial target was the Fortune 500 companies.. so essentially the BES as a product and the BlackBerry architecture as the solution are the result of the backrooms of the Fortune 500 companies of the day. This interoperability made initial TCO for BlackBerry very low (think thousands instead of tens of thousands) and thus made ROI figures very high.
I can't speak about the security implications of this because I just don't know enough about the security environment. RIM used to sell its security on three things: 1) Total AES (then 3DES) encryption from end to end, 2) Everything is behind the firewall (which I surmise is where the problem is here) and 3) FIPS certification. Feel free to offshoot from there.
See my reply to Kasracer re: "small mistake" and my slightly educated guess as to how it would happen. And I do agree that I should be on the business side, not the tech side.. if I was ever on the tech side, these sorts of stories would be a lot more common.
I definitely agree with you re: place for new hires.. I don't think many people would disagree. What I was trying to say is that this is very much the way things are within RIM (e.g. teams working on specific projects with a range of experience and backgrounds in them). I was trying to give a more inside view to how things get done at RIM.. a fair defense given the accusation made in the parent.
But I will also defend RIM a bit more and say that it doesn't matter whether the team is staffed entirely by folks that have been doing the job for 40 years, mistakes still happen.. the important thing isn't to gripe and whine about the problem happening, but rather to focus on a quick and effective solution. That is what is productive and that's what makes a great company great. Hopefully RIM will do just that.
You make several good points. As I said, I'm not fully familiar with all of the advanced technical details of the system (I worked in Marketing). My guess is that this story is blown a wee bit out of proportion, or someone just got a bit sloppy on implementation or something along those lines. I would be genuniely surprised if someone seriously dropped the ball on this.. it just isn't how BlackBerry does business. (Although they do seem to be a bit more "push it out the door" than they may have been two years ago when I worked there.)
My original point (if you take out the negativity focussed at the parent) was that this stuff happens in software and I'm sure it will get fixed soon.
Just to follow up on your other point -- BlackBerry is held by governments and independent audiors as being ridiculously secure. It is one of if not the only wireless email solution that is FIPS-140 cerified, amongst its other security certifications.
I used to work at RIM, and if you honestly think that it is mostly staffed by 23 year olds, you are mistaken. The vast majority of folks at RIM are not fresh out of undergrad and the technical genius that does exist there is indeed very impressive (I worked on the business side, not the tech side.. and the tech guys really know what they're doing). And further, if you honestly think that Lazaridis and Balsillie run the type of place where major design decisions are made by junior people, I'm not surprised that you don't have the qualifications to get a job there.
The fact that they made a small design mistake isn't really that surprising. These things happen all the time. Their response is what's important going forward, and I (as a current BB user) have faith that they will quickly patch this up and move on.
It is indeed a strange question. We were chatting earlier in the interview about perceptions of microsoft's security (*suppressed laughter*) and the whole/. anti-M$ bias thing came up. So at least in that sense the question didn't come right out of the blue. It was, however, probably the first time in an interview that I've ever mentioned slashdot (again, marketing jobs..).
The interviewer didn't think of microsoft as evil. She explained the perception of poor security as the result of being a big target and the fact that mainstream media typically over-publishes MS flaws vs. those in other applications. I'll leave it up to you to determine whether or not that is true.
I responded with something along the lines of "who doesn't want to work for a market leader?" A 'see the industry from the top' sort of response.
I think it was a question that was intended to make me uncomfortable and to see how I would react. The position was security marketing (working on the marketing launch of SP2), and would involve presentations and some light interaction with the press.
I don't think the interviewer that asked the question believed MS to be a "big evil company." She casually said that it was a question she was often asked by her friends in the tech industry.
I did get an offer from MS, but instead took a job working at RIM. RIM's offer was better in terms of the job itself and the fact that it paid a very similar wage regardless that cost of living in Waterloo (RIM HQ) is much cheaper than that in Mississauga (where MS Canada is). That and it might be hard to sleep after a day of promoting MS' security!
I had an interview for a co-op marketing position with Microsoft. The interview went well, I was getting along with the interviewers and we were have a good conversation, and then they asked me the last question......
"How on earth could you ever work for Microsoft, the big evil company??"
Probably the best question I've ever been asked in an interview.
"Scans of the brains of autistic savants suggest that the right hemisphere might be compensating for damage in the left hemisphere. While many savants struggle with language and comprehension (skills associated primarily with the left hemisphere), they often have amazing skills in mathematics and memory (primarily right hemisphere skills)."
I don't disagree with you. This is why I left the definition of a "fair" allocation of resources up to the reader. The potential for control and misuse of information exists, but the presence of new/more/better information brings at least the potential to do better than we are doing now.
We are brainwashed in effect. We live in a system of institutional realities ("assumptions" of the model) and thrive on incentives created by those realities. Veblen had more than a few words to say about this. We do have some degree of independent thought in economic issues, but it is still conditional on the institutional realities e.g. money as a means of exchange, various economic instruments being credible, etc.
To hit specifically on your greed argument -- exchange that does not happen is not welfare-enhancing becasue there is no exchange. Unfair exchange can be (and likely is) welfare enhancing, but not to the same degree that fair exchange is. A greedy transaction is a transaction nonetheless.
Your point is well-taken, but it's an issue of definition. "Greed" has a negative connotation.. it implies a one-sidedness to a transaction, or one party using their market power to exploit another. What fuels exchange is differences in prices and preferences -- the fact that you and I value things differently.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Buy dress for less than $2000.
2. ??
3. Profit!!
"And here I had a perfect reason to break out the ol' 4.5" that goes woefully underutilized most days.."
Wayyyy too easy.
Exactly. During the August 2002 blackout, my area was without power for a day and a half and cell phones worked just fine. Even the paging networks were still operational IIRC. I didn't even think about how they were powered at the time!
I agree with you fully. The merger should not be allowed if it will have anti-competitive consequences, and the track record of the DOJ should make this so, as they tend to err on the side of consumer protection in mergers cases.. it's actually one of the main standards that they use to judge any potential anti-competitive effects.
Deregulation of long distance services has led to price decreases in several countries. In Canada, we don't have deregulated local service yet, but we do have deregulated long distance, and there was a similar effect at its inception. These structural breaks are important movers of prices, and what I mean in the quote is that, outside of such structural breaks, price reductions are generally pretty rare.
But the good thing is that large price increases are also just as rare. I doubt that "the" phone company will re-emerge in terms of its ability to exercise market power.. the DOJ wouldn't stand for that for very long.. it kind of makes a mockery of their processes. It would be in the firms' best interests to keep rates around the same levels less they face some sort of disciplinary response. TFA mentions some regulations as a condition of the merger.. I'm sure that there are provisions in there saying that they shouldn't abuse their market power and that they should sell their networks to competing local carrers (CLECs in the lingo) at a specified markup so as to prevent any lessening of fringe competition.
Yeah but let the US firms fight the big boys -- Vodaphone, O2, the Asian carriers, etc. -- and watch the sparks fly! These guys definitely have the capital required to enter and the reputation required to back up their entry.
You're absolutely right in terms weakened competitive pressures in the face of the bigger mobile-to-mobile pool if they offer free in-network calls, etc. Especially re: free in-network calling -- it's amazing what can be achieved when you remove the carriers' ability to charge each other essentially neutral access fees. Maybe someday we'll get there!
A lot of what I've said in this thread relies on homogenous Bertrand pricing.. the effects still exist in a differentiated Bertrand model, but this is why I keep saying price/quality ratio. It's banking services and ABMs.. you're willing to travel an extra mile if you can get significantly lower transaction fees.
As far as cellular coverage goes, I can't belive some of the horror stories I continue to hear about bad/no service in relatively populated areas.
we're now crossing over into the subjective question of value :)
If there was no downward pressure on rates, then we would have seen price increases in cellular services after the cingular/aws merger a few years ago and, more recently, the nextel/sprint merger. Downward pressure does not necessarily imply a drastic reduction in rates.. in the loosest sense, it means a weak cap on prices.
As well, nested in that assertion is an assumption that landlines and VOIP are perfect substitutes for cellular. They are not. As hetergeneity increases, the downward pressure weakens. But that does not mean that downward pressure does not exist. As I've said in another post, a given consumer would find cellular a much less attractive option if rates doubled overnight. They have not.
Price reductions in and of themselves are generally pretty rare outside of IT. People all over the place seem to think that they should get salary raises and capital owners seem to think that they should get good rates of return... this is the nature of business. Wasn't it Einstein that said that compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe?
A technical note.. in the "potential for market power from vertical integration" part above, it's actually more than just potential. A vertically-integrated firm in a homogenous market where other providers are also vertically integrated has an _incentive_ to not exercise market power (e.g. markups lower and approaching 0 as the homogenous goods become identical). By keeping markups lower, they can price lower and thus profitably take more customers from their competitors. Again, this lower price has to be profitable by definition or else the markup was 0 before the price decrease.
economics is fun.
Cingular and VZW may have their hardware on the same physical tower, but they operate incompatible networks -- VZW is CDMA, Cingular/AWS is GSM -- so you still need to duplicate the costs in the hardware.. same thing as how you can't take a VZW phone and sign up for Cingular service.
T-Mobile and Cingular may share towers and hardware as they both operate on GSM. That would be a better strategy, but they may still have their own separate hardware.. one would expect some coordination problems there. Further, a lack of consolidation in cellular services lowers the buying power of these firms when they're buying the actual network hardware from the upstream firms.
And beyond that, they are still running their own separate services with their own separate overheads, their own separate sales and marketing, their own separate layers of middle management, etc. There's still plenty of scope for efficiencies.
This is an issue of market definition, and I assure you that in the anti-trust investigations that the DOJ will be doing, such similar products are definitely considered for inclusion in the same anti-trust market. A quick link from the Canadian anti-trust people (I couldn't find a good quick US equivalent, but the guidelines are VERY similar): http://www.competitionbureau.gc.ca/internet/index. cfm?itemID=1714&lg=e. Look for the part about the hypothetical monopolist test.
The key point here is that such concentration in one mode of the transportation network is not sufficient for such a merger to have anti-competitive effects. As long as there are at least two firms offering service in similar modes into one network (e.g. VOIP, cellular, and landlines all being "phones"), any exercises of market power would be squashed by competition. I mean, you might not like the sound quality of VOIP or your local cellular coverage right now, but you would enjoy it a lot more if landline access fees went up dramatically, just as you would if the prices for VOIP or cellular fell dramatically.
I'm unfamiliar with internet access markets in the states.. my ignorance, and you make a good point. In Canada, we have essentially two dominant broadband providers. One provides via cable and one uses DSL. Again, this is a multi-mode transportation economy and you see the effects in the pricing of the services -- the firms have nearly identical price/quality ratios. There is a competitive fringe that supplies (broadband) service for a bit cheaper, but you tend to get reliability issues with them (i.e. the price/quality ratio is probably pretty similar).
:)
I would think that cellular services would tend to equalize across carriers regardless of how many carriers there are (as long as there's at least two). Again, this is a homogenous product*, and given similar service levels, I can't see rational consumers flocking to the carrier with higher rates. This gives each carrier the incentive to cut their rates by a small bit to gain more customers, assuming it's profitable on the margin (and if it isn't, then they're already pricing at cost!).
I haven't read nearly enough on the telcos wanting to filter VOIP data. I'd agree with you that it's probably a bad idea/anti-competitive/waiting for a wrist slapping
* I realize that it's not quite homogenous in terms of the hardware that the carriers offer.. e.g. at least for BlackBerry, you see new GSM BlackBerries before you see new CDMA ones.. while this may provide incentives for people to switch from one to another, I can't see why you would switch carriers just because you have to wait 6 months for your preferred incremental product improvement to come along.
But vertical disintegration leads to double marginalization if there is market power on different layers... e.g. the tower owners get a markup on their leases to the cellular companies and then the cellular companies further mark up their costs. If the cellular companies own the towers, there is the potential (emphasis on potential:) for markups in the total delivery for cellular service to be lower. There are definitely areas where vertical restraints/competition across different layers of production are a good idea, but, if we're trying to get the best efficiencies from the merger, the vertical integration isn't terribly bad here.. we don't necessarily want two (or more) providers of towers since that's what we're trying to eliminate in the first place.
:)
Your agriculture example is spot on, but it's because the farmers have no market power. And you are definitely right to fear consolidation in agriculture.. there is nothing scarier than having the delivery of a necessity in the hands of an unregulated firm with market power! (Of course, that's how the states runs their health care, so..
The prevailing thought in the anti-trust/economics literature is that consolidation is generally regarded as a good thing in cellular..
Basically, there are massive density economies in delivering cellular service (e.g. it's better to use a higher percentage of the capacity of one expensive tower vs. having four separate expensive towers running at lower utilization rates), and as such, there are efficiency gains that can come out of such mergers. We're more likely to see continuing consolidation in national cellular markets with a much bigger space for international competition. The companies want to move forward with consolidation, and the anti-trust authorities aren't really standing in their way.
In the US, the anti-trust people really only care about post-merger consumer prices (rather than the increased profitability of the merged entity). The degree of substitutable goods and the nature of price competition in cellular markets seems to keep downward pressure on rates. This is why they are letting all this go through.
As for VOIP (and the greater economy), you only need two firms to get good competitive results from these types of goods. Landline phones and VOIP are essentially homogenous products, and as such, it's perfectly logical to assume that people will go with the firm that offers them the best price/quality ratio. Outside of collusion, odds are good that you will see competition putting downward pressure on prices in landline telephony even if both landlines and VOIP are delivered by monopolies.
Things have changed quite a bit in the 26 years since the breakup. Back then, you either paid Bell's rate or didn't have a phone. Now there are much better substitutes (cellular, VOIP, etc.) and the potential for international competition which should serve to keep a cap on the amount of market power that monopolistic firms can exercise here.
I'll agree with you there -- my experience with the entire TSupport program was that it wasn't very good. The fact is that they want you to pay to get elevated automatically... not necessarily a good customer service practice.
Hey.. at least my UID starts with a 1 :)
Anyway.. I actually asked that question to folks in the tech side.. and their entire reasoning is that in 1999 (and arguably right now), the majority of their install base was running either Exchange or Notes as their email platform.. thus, in original design, they considered tight interoperability as critical to BB's success. That and MAPI allows pretty tight integration between Exchange and the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. (With BES 4.0 they added groupwise to this to support a larger base of government clients.)
BB started in the late 90s and their initial target was the Fortune 500 companies.. so essentially the BES as a product and the BlackBerry architecture as the solution are the result of the backrooms of the Fortune 500 companies of the day. This interoperability made initial TCO for BlackBerry very low (think thousands instead of tens of thousands) and thus made ROI figures very high.
I can't speak about the security implications of this because I just don't know enough about the security environment. RIM used to sell its security on three things: 1) Total AES (then 3DES) encryption from end to end, 2) Everything is behind the firewall (which I surmise is where the problem is here) and 3) FIPS certification. Feel free to offshoot from there.
See my reply to Kasracer re: "small mistake" and my slightly educated guess as to how it would happen. And I do agree that I should be on the business side, not the tech side.. if I was ever on the tech side, these sorts of stories would be a lot more common.
I definitely agree with you re: place for new hires.. I don't think many people would disagree. What I was trying to say is that this is very much the way things are within RIM (e.g. teams working on specific projects with a range of experience and backgrounds in them). I was trying to give a more inside view to how things get done at RIM.. a fair defense given the accusation made in the parent.
But I will also defend RIM a bit more and say that it doesn't matter whether the team is staffed entirely by folks that have been doing the job for 40 years, mistakes still happen.. the important thing isn't to gripe and whine about the problem happening, but rather to focus on a quick and effective solution. That is what is productive and that's what makes a great company great. Hopefully RIM will do just that.
Cheers.
You make several good points. As I said, I'm not fully familiar with all of the advanced technical details of the system (I worked in Marketing). My guess is that this story is blown a wee bit out of proportion, or someone just got a bit sloppy on implementation or something along those lines. I would be genuniely surprised if someone seriously dropped the ball on this.. it just isn't how BlackBerry does business. (Although they do seem to be a bit more "push it out the door" than they may have been two years ago when I worked there.)
r /groupwise/security.shtml is my source and a good starting point to read more about BlackBerry security. This page is far too buried on the site if you ask me...
My original point (if you take out the negativity focussed at the parent) was that this stuff happens in software and I'm sure it will get fixed soon.
Just to follow up on your other point -- BlackBerry is held by governments and independent audiors as being ridiculously secure. It is one of if not the only wireless email solution that is FIPS-140 cerified, amongst its other security certifications.
http://www.blackberry.net/products/software/serve
Have a good one.
I used to work at RIM, and if you honestly think that it is mostly staffed by 23 year olds, you are mistaken. The vast majority of folks at RIM are not fresh out of undergrad and the technical genius that does exist there is indeed very impressive (I worked on the business side, not the tech side.. and the tech guys really know what they're doing). And further, if you honestly think that Lazaridis and Balsillie run the type of place where major design decisions are made by junior people, I'm not surprised that you don't have the qualifications to get a job there.
The fact that they made a small design mistake isn't really that surprising. These things happen all the time. Their response is what's important going forward, and I (as a current BB user) have faith that they will quickly patch this up and move on.
It is indeed a strange question. We were chatting earlier in the interview about perceptions of microsoft's security (*suppressed laughter*) and the whole /. anti-M$ bias thing came up. So at least in that sense the question didn't come right out of the blue. It was, however, probably the first time in an interview that I've ever mentioned slashdot (again, marketing jobs..).
The interviewer didn't think of microsoft as evil. She explained the perception of poor security as the result of being a big target and the fact that mainstream media typically over-publishes MS flaws vs. those in other applications. I'll leave it up to you to determine whether or not that is true.
I responded with something along the lines of "who doesn't want to work for a market leader?" A 'see the industry from the top' sort of response.
I think it was a question that was intended to make me uncomfortable and to see how I would react. The position was security marketing (working on the marketing launch of SP2), and would involve presentations and some light interaction with the press.
I don't think the interviewer that asked the question believed MS to be a "big evil company." She casually said that it was a question she was often asked by her friends in the tech industry.
I did get an offer from MS, but instead took a job working at RIM. RIM's offer was better in terms of the job itself and the fact that it paid a very similar wage regardless that cost of living in Waterloo (RIM HQ) is much cheaper than that in Mississauga (where MS Canada is). That and it might be hard to sleep after a day of promoting MS' security!
I had an interview for a co-op marketing position with Microsoft. The interview went well, I was getting along with the interviewers and we were have a good conversation, and then they asked me the last question......
"How on earth could you ever work for Microsoft, the big evil company??"
Probably the best question I've ever been asked in an interview.
FTA:
"Scans of the brains of autistic savants suggest that the right hemisphere might be compensating for damage in the left hemisphere. While many savants struggle with language and comprehension (skills associated primarily with the left hemisphere), they often have amazing skills in mathematics and memory (primarily right hemisphere skills)."
I don't disagree with you. This is why I left the definition of a "fair" allocation of resources up to the reader. The potential for control and misuse of information exists, but the presence of new/more/better information brings at least the potential to do better than we are doing now.
We are brainwashed in effect. We live in a system of institutional realities ("assumptions" of the model) and thrive on incentives created by those realities. Veblen had more than a few words to say about this. We do have some degree of independent thought in economic issues, but it is still conditional on the institutional realities e.g. money as a means of exchange, various economic instruments being credible, etc.
To hit specifically on your greed argument -- exchange that does not happen is not welfare-enhancing becasue there is no exchange. Unfair exchange can be (and likely is) welfare enhancing, but not to the same degree that fair exchange is. A greedy transaction is a transaction nonetheless.
Your point is well-taken, but it's an issue of definition. "Greed" has a negative connotation.. it implies a one-sidedness to a transaction, or one party using their market power to exploit another. What fuels exchange is differences in prices and preferences -- the fact that you and I value things differently.