The carrier has a higher risk when you buy your phone outright: the risk of you switching to another carrier when the other carrier offers you better conditions. That's why there are long-running contracts in the first place.
So at the point when I've already been convinced to purchase a phone that's locked me to a carrier and (here in the US at least) would have to purchase an entirely new phone to switch to a competing carrier... you're saying they need to increase the per-minute-cost because they're concerned I may jump ship to a competitor?
It seems more likely the concern would be that I'm not going to buy any more minutes... which if I don't, still has no financial penalty for them. If they don't like the APRU of pre-paid customers, that's not them "taking on risk", that's them trying to increase the cost of their service. Which is exactly what I would expect and why I doubt if subsidies are eliminated the cost of service would go down.
If they do away with the subsidy, you will have to pay full retail price for phones, but your monthly bill will be lower.
Speculation presented as fact... and it's not even a sentiment that's supported by the history of the carriers. Yeah, they might do away with subsidies, but does anyone really think the monthly fees will go down? They don't go down now when you've gone out of contact and more than paid for the cost of your phone. Or you can outright buy a phone that's prepaid and in return for less risk on the carriers part, you'll pay a higher price per minute.
They did that long ago when they refused to participate in other software ecosystems, and concentrated on locking competitors out by locking customers in.
Now their locked-in market is failing, and the world is bypassing their restrictions. They don't have time to develop good, competitive software, all they can do is assault competitors with any tools they have at hand.
It's an ugly, desperate thing we're seeing here.
Wait... are you talking about Microsoft or Google here?
How long do you think they can keep overcharging without providing a better product?
Depending on your point of view: They either do have a better product or they've been able to keep up overcharging for I don't know... the past decade?
Frankly, I'm tempted by $10/mo for Illustrator. The retail box of CS6 is $540, and I have no product from which to upgrade. So for the cost of the boxed version (with its potential resale or upgrade value factored in), I get 4 1/2 years of use of the latest version. One key difference is I can easily drop it after 1 year (and $120), if I don't need it any more.
There are some bad assumptions in here... The $10 a month plan (for a single app) is only good for 1-year and you can only get it if you own a previous CS6 product. (Plus you have to sign up for a full-year to get it.) So the price will jump up to $20 a month after the first year... maybe. That's assuming that $20 a month is what they will be charging in year. And you can only "easily drop it" assuming you don't have to sign-up for a multi-year contract to get that $20 a month offer. You have no idea what Adobe will be charging in the future or what the conditions of getting a contract will be. So if you are lucky you will get 33-months out of $540 on Illustrator. They typically update Illustrator every 2 years, so you may get an upgrade in there, but who knows if you'd even want it? (Or have a machine that can run it.) They're banking on the subscription offers looking good because people will fill the blanks in with the best case scenarios.
Outdated? You could still buy a new Wii through normal retail channels in 2012 (maybe you still can). Less than a year of support is the standard now?
Part of me wonders if this is because these are the exact features the Wii U doesn't support in its Wii mode, so it removes a reason someone might replace their broken Wii with a new Wii instead of a Wii U... but I also wonder how many zombie-Wiis are out there, downloading weather and new Miis every night, even though they haven't been turned on in years. It reminds me of the cost of running the HTML DTD servers, constantly serving millions of completely unnecessary requests.
one peculiar thing about the wii-u though: WHAT THE FUCK DOES THE OS NEED 1 GIG OF RAM FOR????!#?"#??#!?nintendo selling your console time as a cloud service??
Probably so it can run a full web browser and a game at the same time. (Whether it's the built in web-browser or the Miiverse or eShop versions.)
So if the spammers botnets are busy with a ddos attack, has there been any measurable decrease in spam on the internet? I haven't seen any internet slowdowns, but I haven't seen any slowdown in spam either...
Slashdot Mirror
So at the point when I've already been convinced to purchase a phone that's locked me to a carrier and (here in the US at least) would have to purchase an entirely new phone to switch to a competing carrier... you're saying they need to increase the per-minute-cost because they're concerned I may jump ship to a competitor?
It seems more likely the concern would be that I'm not going to buy any more minutes... which if I don't, still has no financial penalty for them. If they don't like the APRU of pre-paid customers, that's not them "taking on risk", that's them trying to increase the cost of their service. Which is exactly what I would expect and why I doubt if subsidies are eliminated the cost of service would go down.
Speculation presented as fact... and it's not even a sentiment that's supported by the history of the carriers. Yeah, they might do away with subsidies, but does anyone really think the monthly fees will go down? They don't go down now when you've gone out of contact and more than paid for the cost of your phone. Or you can outright buy a phone that's prepaid and in return for less risk on the carriers part, you'll pay a higher price per minute.
Wait... are you talking about Microsoft or Google here?
Depending on your point of view: They either do have a better product or they've been able to keep up overcharging for I don't know... the past decade?
There are some bad assumptions in here... The $10 a month plan (for a single app) is only good for 1-year and you can only get it if you own a previous CS6 product. (Plus you have to sign up for a full-year to get it.) So the price will jump up to $20 a month after the first year... maybe. That's assuming that $20 a month is what they will be charging in year. And you can only "easily drop it" assuming you don't have to sign-up for a multi-year contract to get that $20 a month offer. You have no idea what Adobe will be charging in the future or what the conditions of getting a contract will be. So if you are lucky you will get 33-months out of $540 on Illustrator. They typically update Illustrator every 2 years, so you may get an upgrade in there, but who knows if you'd even want it? (Or have a machine that can run it.) They're banking on the subscription offers looking good because people will fill the blanks in with the best case scenarios.
Part of me wonders if this is because these are the exact features the Wii U doesn't support in its Wii mode, so it removes a reason someone might replace their broken Wii with a new Wii instead of a Wii U... but I also wonder how many zombie-Wiis are out there, downloading weather and new Miis every night, even though they haven't been turned on in years. It reminds me of the cost of running the HTML DTD servers, constantly serving millions of completely unnecessary requests.
Probably so it can run a full web browser and a game at the same time. (Whether it's the built in web-browser or the Miiverse or eShop versions.)
So if the spammers botnets are busy with a ddos attack, has there been any measurable decrease in spam on the internet? I haven't seen any internet slowdowns, but I haven't seen any slowdown in spam either...
I still can't access cb3rob.com and cb3rob.net on two different ISPs, so I think this counts as a pyrrhic victory.