If you buy a copy of Home/Student Office 2008, you get 3 license keys (3 installs) for $130 at Amazon. That's $44 per install for those of you keeping score.
That is probably a truer indication of it's worth. Basically, you're paying $44/machine to moves office files to/from work. That's a reasonable price.
As for the several hundred dollars MS wants for the "corporate" version... not so much.
"If I knew how to break into your house, then told you that I was able to but won't tell you how unless you paid up a fee?"
That's called Anti-Virus, and a lot of companies get rich from it.
No seriously, is that really any different than saying:
"I know how to make sure you won't die from aids, but I won't save your life unless you pay me for the medicine"
If you accept the idea of Intellectual Property, I see this as a natural progression of IP. What's good for the goose is good for that gander.
"I personally think that if WGA can keep the already high price of windows down then there's nothing wrong with it."
WGA has nothing to do with keeping the cost of windows down. It has everything to do with maximizing profits.
Now, let me say, there is nothing wrong with that. Companies should be able to charge anything they want for a product, and if people want to pay it (even foolishly), I think that's fine.
But piracy has nothing to do with the cost of Windows; the cost of Windows has to do primarily with how much the OEM's will pay for it. Therefore WGA is not keeping your price low. It's just a PITA to make sure a few more million bucks profit goes to MS each quarter.
It is indeed funny that people put up with it, particularly people who bought it in good faith expecting a better experience than software pirates.
It's only an expensive product because people have tricked themselves into believing there are no alternatives.
Windows 3.1 was $130 and commonly discounted to $80. That was for the whole OS, not split up so you have 4 different versions. The top price was $80. The cost was low because Microsoft had competition.
Now that the installed based is two orders of magnitude greater, the price should be cheaper or maybe the same. Even the cost of Apple's computers dropped significantly. But for MS Windows, the cost doubled or tripled. All because consumers refuse to use alternatives. We're our own worst enemy.
So this argument is an ironic one in that once Microsoft made Windows the most expensive piece of software on your computer, they had to put in place lots of things to "protect" it against people who didn't get the message that you pay whatever Microsoft wants for an operating system.
In any event, this argument misses the point. WGA was put in place because Microsoft has no more market-share to get. They only have two place to get more money... charging more money for Windows, and reducing the amount of piracy. So WGA has been designed solely to reduce piracy rates of windows a few percentage points.
Irony again! To make another few million dolalrs, MS decided to irritate every customer with new types of monthly checks to make sure you're "Genuine".
And I wonder if pirates who know what they're doing are bothered by WGA in the least?
The people involved are going out of their way to say it's not perpetual motion; rather, the experiment is not working as predicted. There are many explanations for that. The guy involved has basically wrecked his life over tinkering with it.
And the articles don't give enough details to judge much.
But so far, slashdot is the only article that talks about perpetual motion.
I think you make what seems like a compelling argument, but I think the reality is a little bit different.
Broadband is extremely lucrative, but it also has a high startup cost. That explains why Verizon is spending $Billions on rolling out fiber across the country. It partially explains why Comcast has revenues of almost $27B in 2006, with almost $6B of that coming from the broadband business (http://www.telecommagazine.com/newsglobe/article.asp?HH_ID=AR_2806). That represented an 18% increase over the year before.
The ISP business is very lucrative, but you have to convince someone to loan you a couple $Billion and grow. It's not easy to make any business grow to this size. Very similar to starting a cell phone business.
As to your price argument, it seems nice in theory, but the reality is that the price of broadband is related to what you will pay, and what the competition is charging. Thus, the guy down the street downloading 500G per month might be slightly raising some cost to the ISP, but your bill is not related to that. Trust me, if your ISP thought he wouldn't lose too much business raising his rates by $10/month, he would raise it in an instant, regardless of his costs.
Moreover, I still don't get why I would buy a 15Mb connection from Verizon (yes, very common) and then limit myself to a few gigabytes per month. A fast connection doesn't help my web pages load faster. Overall, why would you get a fast connection just to do the occasional download and a lot of surfing? If that's your profile, that's not a problem, get the cheap DSL packages that you can now get from Verizon for around $20 when they run promotions.
My point is that it doesn't make sense to offer people a big fat pipe and then tell them "Don't use it, because you're abusing the network".
"We don't say to burglars, "that's OK, just give the stuff back and we're square""
Actually, we sort of do. If you are a first time offender, you'll get probation and you have to give the stuff back. If you don't have it, you have to pay them the value of what you stole.
So you're better off breaking into the homes of people to steal CD's. At worst, you have to give back the CD.
Think about that... some guy shares some files, and it's worse for him than had he smashed the window of the local Fye and stole a handful of CD's.
Seriously, books could probably exist without user restrictions because they're still too difficult to copy.
And ebooks don't come close to the readability, convenience, and utility of an actual book.
And if you think you're the only reader of books, how do you explain that every mall in American has at least one bookstore, and the internet is filled with book sellers (B&N, Amazon, Caimen, Powells... the list is endless).
I frankly see the TV Network most at risk since they seem to do their best at annoying viewers with endless commercials and taking 1/3 the screen space to remind you of the network name.
He's confusing the difference between "free" (no restrictions on use) and "free" (doesn't cost anything).
Giving up DRM is not making things "no cost", they're removing restrictions that were artificially placed on the listening to music. I'll bet he doesn't understand what it means when you say Linux is "free". I'll bet he doesn't get it a bit.
Further, I don't think he cares. It shows that you don't need critical thinking skills to get a job in media.
"But I don't see the current situation being sustainable "
When everybody started dial-up internet services, initially, all the ISP's were "unlimited". Their customer base was small, and of course, dial-up limited the amount of stuff you could send. Then when everybody hooked up, they went with "metered" service on the argument that they had to pay real money for lines, for telephone switches, and backend bandwidth.
A lot of ISP's tried to do it. And they typically got their butts whipped by ISP's that didn't meter their service. The net result was although we were told it was "impossible", it turned out the ISP's really didn't have a problem handling "unlimited" service. They were simply forced to invest in infrastructure.
That's what we have here. It's not "impossible" to provide the bandwidth that people want; it's just that they would rather not, because it cuts into profits. I'm not "blaming" them. I would try the same thing. What I don't get are people who advocate this as if there was some universally accepted fairness in broadband that dictated what companies should provide and what people should accept as "fair" service.
If Comcast wants to charge by the byte, by all means they should. But that doesn't make it fair or right, it's simply more profitable for them. And I would expect Verizon to kick their butt either with fiber or DSL. Comcast is a very profitable company. Their investors will have to decide if they want to invest money in their infrastructure to compete with the Verizons of the world. If they value short term profits over market share, they'll add bandwidth caps. I expect it will be a short experiment.
"and it brings a nice clarity to the product rather than receiving a letter claiming you've surpassed some mysterious "limit.""
Clarity? Well yeah, I suppose it does.
But good for the consumer? I fail to how.
A letter affects a handful of people. A bandwidth cap affects everybody.
People who only use a little bandwidth seem to think the cable companies will lower prices. The rate you pay now will be unchanged, but in general, if you use more than a little bandwidth, then you pay extra.
Remember when the FCC forced the cable companies to offer a lower tier for people who didn't want all the channels? All they did was provide the local channels (what was already free) and then charged people $10-15 a month for what you could already get for free. The tier that people wanted (ESPN, CNN, A few movie channels), the price was raised.
In general, the FCC found as a result of this tiering of service, prices went up, not down.
There are parallels here, but the tiering of service is not done to reduce usage or lower prices for intermittent users, it will be used to raise everyone's price and the cable companies will make out like a bandit.
I also find it somewhat ironic that for years, the pitch for broadband has been "high data rates, unlimited usage! Better than Dial-up", and now that people have switched, they turn around and say "whoa, we don't have the bandwidth to do what we said...".
I don't know how all these new video on demand services are going to work with these bandwidth caps. In my house, we listen to free internet radio constantly, and that probably adds several gigabytes to the monthly totals.
It's like a throwback to 1995. I'm not surprised Cable Companies are trying to turn back the clock.
Well, you're right in the abstract, but I don't have the ability to "fix" the market, so tiered pricing looks like a big PR campaign to justify charging more money.
You are correct. However, my preferences would be to change the law to:
a) Force the party suing people to first prove they know the exact person who infringed the copyright - it's kind of like those speed cameras. Since they can't tell who was driving, the fine is $40, no points, and by law they can't be used by insurance companies to raise fees.
b) The punishment matches the crime - If you share a electronic copy of a CD, the retail price is about $8-10, as determined by the market. That would be the maximum punishment. If this is someone who has never been convicted of sharing copyrighted materials, there would be no punishment for a "first offense".
c) The fines/fees from any punishment would be used to fund the arts - this allows the RIAA/MPAA to put their money where their mouths are. They keep saying they're protecting the artist (RIAA), or that every time a movie is copied, then a stuntman or gaffer is put out of work. Well, this allows the arts to flourish, and deters people from sharing copyrighted material.
d) so-called "intellectual property" will be treated as real property, including the levy of "property tax" on the fair market value of the so-called "intellectual property". This would encourage artists and companies to maximize the value of productive property and abandon property that is not productive.
I've already purchased from Amazon, but I won't buy from iTMS for a few reasons:
1) Amazon has more attractive prices (generally $8 for a CD)
2) It's in MP3. I think non-DRM's AAC files are fine, but MP3's are more desirable.
3) Amazon just downloads the stuff to your hard drive. It feels just like a purchase.
All that said, CD's are more desirable, and if purchased used are a better value (they can be legally resold). But the Amazon model is the first electronic system to be interesting enough for me to pay money for it.
If it was an actual article, there might have been some sort of analysis done, or some sort of inquiry made. But nope, just took the BSA's word for it.
How many companies paid $100K rather than deal with it in court?
Regardless of it's a game or it's a virtual life (which is more or less the same thing), the is that it's not real. If people do something dumb in a virtual life or get scammed, I assume that's the charm of the game. It doesn't affect the real person in a significant way, any more than dying in a video game.
People should take it as a learning experience and be grateful their mortgage wasn't on the line.
"If the people of the United States (or any country) want to ban online gambling then what business of the WTO is it? "
Well, if you join the WTO asking it to enforce your IP laws, you can't complain if they enforce somebody else's laws as well. That would be like saying "I'm all for government benefits, but I'm not in favor of taxes". Sure, we do that now, but it's not logical.
From the review at Amazon:
"The first flyers were so secretive and desperate to cash in on their invention that their behavior actually "retarded" the development of aviation."
The Wright Brothers felt they had "invented flight". They were trying to interpret their patents as broadly as possible. Eventually, WW I forced the US Government to force the Wrights to share the patents with other companies. The Wright brothers did not come to a happy end. That part of the story is never told in elementary school history.
Patents and copyrights are broken. They've always been broken, and I suspect they will be broken to a certain extent. They just happen to be extraordinarily broken at the moment.
The problem is on the internet for 50 cent parts, it's tough to order. The big places have essentially $10-20 minimums because of the high cost of shipping small items. When I need parts, I need it within 24 hours, not within a week.
I was repairing a vacuum cleaner that needed a 15A Slow-Blow fuse. Radio Shack will only sell up to 10A Slow-Blow. I finally got the part at the local got-it-all hardware store, although I had to take ceramic instead of glass. Although it finally forced me to understand why you use ceramics instead of glass.
I call what you're talking about the "Radio Shack" effect.
Many years ago (probably before most of you were even born), Radio Shack used to employ salesmen who actually knew about electronics. They could read a resistor color code, they could solder; heck when you brought in something to repair (from the "REALISTIC" brand), they would actually fix it in the store. As you might expect, this type of help commanded more than minimum wage.
Some president of Tandy said "Gee, why am I paying so much for sales help. I could offer high-school kids minimum wage and save $millions this year!" which was true, but also eliminated a lot of reason people went to radio shack. So they fired the guys who could actually help you, and hired kids who could find the battery section if you helped them.
So here's where the "Radio Shack Effect" starts... You have customers coming in looking for expert help that is now gone. It takes customers a while to catch on fully, and so over the next 6-36 months, customers don't come back. You're reduced the reason for people coming into the store for parts.. But not before the CEO just added to the bottom line of year 1. Never mind that years 2->forever will have negative growth... that's the next CEO's job to worry about.
And by the way... for some unknown reason, Radio Shack could no longer sell electronics parts. Funny how that worked. So they got rid of the parts, too. I went in the other day looking for fuses; they only had a handful and suggested I go to "Home Depot". Ouch. Tell me again why people go to Radio Shack these days?
Slashdot Mirror
If you buy a copy of Home/Student Office 2008, you get 3 license keys (3 installs) for $130 at Amazon. That's $44 per install for those of you keeping score.
That is probably a truer indication of it's worth. Basically, you're paying $44/machine to moves office files to/from work. That's a reasonable price.
As for the several hundred dollars MS wants for the "corporate" version... not so much.
"If I knew how to break into your house, then told you that I was able to but won't tell you how unless you paid up a fee?"
That's called Anti-Virus, and a lot of companies get rich from it.
No seriously, is that really any different than saying:
"I know how to make sure you won't die from aids, but I won't save your life unless you pay me for the medicine"
If you accept the idea of Intellectual Property, I see this as a natural progression of IP. What's good for the goose is good for that gander.
"I personally think that if WGA can keep the already high price of windows down then there's nothing wrong with it."
WGA has nothing to do with keeping the cost of windows down. It has everything to do with maximizing profits.
Now, let me say, there is nothing wrong with that. Companies should be able to charge anything they want for a product, and if people want to pay it (even foolishly), I think that's fine.
But piracy has nothing to do with the cost of Windows; the cost of Windows has to do primarily with how much the OEM's will pay for it. Therefore WGA is not keeping your price low. It's just a PITA to make sure a few more million bucks profit goes to MS each quarter.
It is indeed funny that people put up with it, particularly people who bought it in good faith expecting a better experience than software pirates.
"It's an expensive product"
It's only an expensive product because people have tricked themselves into believing there are no alternatives.
Windows 3.1 was $130 and commonly discounted to $80. That was for the whole OS, not split up so you have 4 different versions. The top price was $80. The cost was low because Microsoft had competition.
Now that the installed based is two orders of magnitude greater, the price should be cheaper or maybe the same. Even the cost of Apple's computers dropped significantly. But for MS Windows, the cost doubled or tripled. All because consumers refuse to use alternatives. We're our own worst enemy.
So this argument is an ironic one in that once Microsoft made Windows the most expensive piece of software on your computer, they had to put in place lots of things to "protect" it against people who didn't get the message that you pay whatever Microsoft wants for an operating system.
In any event, this argument misses the point. WGA was put in place because Microsoft has no more market-share to get. They only have two place to get more money... charging more money for Windows, and reducing the amount of piracy. So WGA has been designed solely to reduce piracy rates of windows a few percentage points.
Irony again! To make another few million dolalrs, MS decided to irritate every customer with new types of monthly checks to make sure you're "Genuine".
And I wonder if pirates who know what they're doing are bothered by WGA in the least?
The people involved are going out of their way to say it's not perpetual motion; rather, the experiment is not working as predicted. There are many explanations for that. The guy involved has basically wrecked his life over tinkering with it.
And the articles don't give enough details to judge much.
But so far, slashdot is the only article that talks about perpetual motion.
I think you make what seems like a compelling argument, but I think the reality is a little bit different.
Broadband is extremely lucrative, but it also has a high startup cost. That explains why Verizon is spending $Billions on rolling out fiber across the country. It partially explains why Comcast has revenues of almost $27B in 2006, with almost $6B of that coming from the broadband business (http://www.telecommagazine.com/newsglobe/article.asp?HH_ID=AR_2806). That represented an 18% increase over the year before.
The ISP business is very lucrative, but you have to convince someone to loan you a couple $Billion and grow. It's not easy to make any business grow to this size. Very similar to starting a cell phone business.
As to your price argument, it seems nice in theory, but the reality is that the price of broadband is related to what you will pay, and what the competition is charging. Thus, the guy down the street downloading 500G per month might be slightly raising some cost to the ISP, but your bill is not related to that. Trust me, if your ISP thought he wouldn't lose too much business raising his rates by $10/month, he would raise it in an instant, regardless of his costs.
Moreover, I still don't get why I would buy a 15Mb connection from Verizon (yes, very common) and then limit myself to a few gigabytes per month. A fast connection doesn't help my web pages load faster. Overall, why would you get a fast connection just to do the occasional download and a lot of surfing? If that's your profile, that's not a problem, get the cheap DSL packages that you can now get from Verizon for around $20 when they run promotions.
My point is that it doesn't make sense to offer people a big fat pipe and then tell them "Don't use it, because you're abusing the network".
The fire breathing beer commercial was so dumb that the CEO should probably fire their agency and marketing department.
And they paid first commercial money for that. Ouch.
"Really? I thought it meant they're using Comcast."
Francis has already yelled at us for making jokes about this. Apparently this is not a joking matter.
"We don't say to burglars, "that's OK, just give the stuff back and we're square""
Actually, we sort of do. If you are a first time offender, you'll get probation and you have to give the stuff back. If you don't have it, you have to pay them the value of what you stole.
So you're better off breaking into the homes of people to steal CD's. At worst, you have to give back the CD.
Think about that... some guy shares some files, and it's worse for him than had he smashed the window of the local Fye and stole a handful of CD's.
Seriously, books could probably exist without user restrictions because they're still too difficult to copy.
And ebooks don't come close to the readability, convenience, and utility of an actual book.
And if you think you're the only reader of books, how do you explain that every mall in American has at least one bookstore, and the internet is filled with book sellers (B&N, Amazon, Caimen, Powells... the list is endless).
I frankly see the TV Network most at risk since they seem to do their best at annoying viewers with endless commercials and taking 1/3 the screen space to remind you of the network name.
He's confusing the difference between "free" (no restrictions on use) and "free" (doesn't cost anything).
Giving up DRM is not making things "no cost", they're removing restrictions that were artificially placed on the listening to music. I'll bet he doesn't understand what it means when you say Linux is "free". I'll bet he doesn't get it a bit.
Further, I don't think he cares. It shows that you don't need critical thinking skills to get a job in media.
"But I don't see the current situation being sustainable "
When everybody started dial-up internet services, initially, all the ISP's were "unlimited". Their customer base was small, and of course, dial-up limited the amount of stuff you could send. Then when everybody hooked up, they went with "metered" service on the argument that they had to pay real money for lines, for telephone switches, and backend bandwidth.
A lot of ISP's tried to do it. And they typically got their butts whipped by ISP's that didn't meter their service. The net result was although we were told it was "impossible", it turned out the ISP's really didn't have a problem handling "unlimited" service. They were simply forced to invest in infrastructure.
That's what we have here. It's not "impossible" to provide the bandwidth that people want; it's just that they would rather not, because it cuts into profits. I'm not "blaming" them. I would try the same thing. What I don't get are people who advocate this as if there was some universally accepted fairness in broadband that dictated what companies should provide and what people should accept as "fair" service.
If Comcast wants to charge by the byte, by all means they should. But that doesn't make it fair or right, it's simply more profitable for them. And I would expect Verizon to kick their butt either with fiber or DSL. Comcast is a very profitable company. Their investors will have to decide if they want to invest money in their infrastructure to compete with the Verizons of the world. If they value short term profits over market share, they'll add bandwidth caps. I expect it will be a short experiment.
"and it brings a nice clarity to the product rather than receiving a letter claiming you've surpassed some mysterious "limit.""
Clarity? Well yeah, I suppose it does.
But good for the consumer? I fail to how.
A letter affects a handful of people. A bandwidth cap affects everybody.
People who only use a little bandwidth seem to think the cable companies will lower prices. The rate you pay now will be unchanged, but in general, if you use more than a little bandwidth, then you pay extra.
Remember when the FCC forced the cable companies to offer a lower tier for people who didn't want all the channels? All they did was provide the local channels (what was already free) and then charged people $10-15 a month for what you could already get for free. The tier that people wanted (ESPN, CNN, A few movie channels), the price was raised.
In general, the FCC found as a result of this tiering of service, prices went up, not down.
There are parallels here, but the tiering of service is not done to reduce usage or lower prices for intermittent users, it will be used to raise everyone's price and the cable companies will make out like a bandit.
I also find it somewhat ironic that for years, the pitch for broadband has been "high data rates, unlimited usage! Better than Dial-up", and now that people have switched, they turn around and say "whoa, we don't have the bandwidth to do what we said...".
I don't know how all these new video on demand services are going to work with these bandwidth caps. In my house, we listen to free internet radio constantly, and that probably adds several gigabytes to the monthly totals.
It's like a throwback to 1995. I'm not surprised Cable Companies are trying to turn back the clock.
Your link shows them as the leading provider in the retail space.
Well, you're right in the abstract, but I don't have the ability to "fix" the market, so tiered pricing looks like a big PR campaign to justify charging more money.
You are correct. However, my preferences would be to change the law to:
a) Force the party suing people to first prove they know the exact person who infringed the copyright - it's kind of like those speed cameras. Since they can't tell who was driving, the fine is $40, no points, and by law they can't be used by insurance companies to raise fees.
b) The punishment matches the crime - If you share a electronic copy of a CD, the retail price is about $8-10, as determined by the market. That would be the maximum punishment. If this is someone who has never been convicted of sharing copyrighted materials, there would be no punishment for a "first offense".
c) The fines/fees from any punishment would be used to fund the arts - this allows the RIAA/MPAA to put their money where their mouths are. They keep saying they're protecting the artist (RIAA), or that every time a movie is copied, then a stuntman or gaffer is put out of work. Well, this allows the arts to flourish, and deters people from sharing copyrighted material.
d) so-called "intellectual property" will be treated as real property, including the levy of "property tax" on the fair market value of the so-called "intellectual property". This would encourage artists and companies to maximize the value of productive property and abandon property that is not productive.
I've already purchased from Amazon, but I won't buy from iTMS for a few reasons:
1) Amazon has more attractive prices (generally $8 for a CD)
2) It's in MP3. I think non-DRM's AAC files are fine, but MP3's are more desirable.
3) Amazon just downloads the stuff to your hard drive. It feels just like a purchase.
All that said, CD's are more desirable, and if purchased used are a better value (they can be legally resold). But the Amazon model is the first electronic system to be interesting enough for me to pay money for it.
The whole thing is an advertisement for the BSA.
If it was an actual article, there might have been some sort of analysis done, or some sort of inquiry made. But nope, just took the BSA's word for it.
How many companies paid $100K rather than deal with it in court?
"And if the industry is forced to get their act together and actually do it right,"
Presumably, the BluRay/HD-DVD people had their act together and did it right. How did that work out?
Regardless of it's a game or it's a virtual life (which is more or less the same thing), the is that it's not real. If people do something dumb in a virtual life or get scammed, I assume that's the charm of the game. It doesn't affect the real person in a significant way, any more than dying in a video game.
People should take it as a learning experience and be grateful their mortgage wasn't on the line.
"If the people of the United States (or any country) want to ban online gambling then what business of the WTO is it? "
Well, if you join the WTO asking it to enforce your IP laws, you can't complain if they enforce somebody else's laws as well. That would be like saying "I'm all for government benefits, but I'm not in favor of taxes". Sure, we do that now, but it's not logical.
Today I have more respect for Bell.
Check out the Wright Brother's patent story for how the pursuit of patents and copyrights is the ruin of more than more inventor.
http://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Sky-Hammond-Curtiss-Airplane/dp/0060956151/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1198767099&sr=8-2
From the review at Amazon:
"The first flyers were so secretive and desperate to cash in on their invention that their behavior actually "retarded" the development of aviation."
The Wright Brothers felt they had "invented flight". They were trying to interpret their patents as broadly as possible. Eventually, WW I forced the US Government to force the Wrights to share the patents with other companies. The Wright brothers did not come to a happy end. That part of the story is never told in elementary school history.
Patents and copyrights are broken. They've always been broken, and I suspect they will be broken to a certain extent. They just happen to be extraordinarily broken at the moment.
The problem is on the internet for 50 cent parts, it's tough to order. The big places have essentially $10-20 minimums because of the high cost of shipping small items. When I need parts, I need it within 24 hours, not within a week.
I was repairing a vacuum cleaner that needed a 15A Slow-Blow fuse. Radio Shack will only sell up to 10A Slow-Blow. I finally got the part at the local got-it-all hardware store, although I had to take ceramic instead of glass. Although it finally forced me to understand why you use ceramics instead of glass.
There is a big market for a "free* GPS system. That market is basically "the entire world".
It gets quite a bit smaller when there's a subscription fee involved. And even that market is quite small when there's a free alternative.
I call what you're talking about the "Radio Shack" effect.
Many years ago (probably before most of you were even born), Radio Shack used to employ salesmen who actually knew about electronics. They could read a resistor color code, they could solder; heck when you brought in something to repair (from the "REALISTIC" brand), they would actually fix it in the store. As you might expect, this type of help commanded more than minimum wage.
Some president of Tandy said "Gee, why am I paying so much for sales help. I could offer high-school kids minimum wage and save $millions this year!" which was true, but also eliminated a lot of reason people went to radio shack. So they fired the guys who could actually help you, and hired kids who could find the battery section if you helped them.
So here's where the "Radio Shack Effect" starts... You have customers coming in looking for expert help that is now gone. It takes customers a while to catch on fully, and so over the next 6-36 months, customers don't come back. You're reduced the reason for people coming into the store for parts.. But not before the CEO just added to the bottom line of year 1. Never mind that years 2->forever will have negative growth... that's the next CEO's job to worry about.
And by the way... for some unknown reason, Radio Shack could no longer sell electronics parts. Funny how that worked. So they got rid of the parts, too. I went in the other day looking for fuses; they only had a handful and suggested I go to "Home Depot". Ouch. Tell me again why people go to Radio Shack these days?