Comment Re:Power Imbalance (Score 1, Troll) 63
These companies understand the power of default choices and pay billions to keep it that way. They want to stifle potentially disruptive newcomers, the likes of which they once were.
These companies understand the power of default choices and pay billions to keep it that way. They want to stifle potentially disruptive newcomers, the likes of which they once were.
If there are legitimate alternatives to the Apple and Google app stores you'd see a race to the bottom, like companies shopping around their HQ mailing address to the country with the lowest tax rate and stable government.
There is clearly a power imbalance when companies routinely prevent pricing transparency or alternative payment methods to provide customers with information and choice. They are 2 functional players in the mobile app market, Apple and Google.
Congratulations to them, they have reached the top and triggered a market rebalance.
Phil Spencer: How can we juice more money out of our mobile gaming platform?
M$ employee: Put ads in more places in the UI and inside games, like between levels and cut scenes. But there's a problem.
Phil Spencer: What?
M$ employee: We don't have a mobile gaming platform.
Phil Spencer: Let's buy Nintendo.
(US centric viewpoint) When it comes to text books, larger states and larger universities should at least make their basic/common course texts in-house and free to students and staff without any DRM or convoluted access methods. You should be able to download the entire "book" as a PDF. I attended a university where all their core math books were made in house, PDF only. If you needed or want to print something, that's on you.
Texas spends more than $500 Million annually on text books. https://ncse.ngo/evolution-sti...
That kind of money could surely go toward making their own digital and print textbooks much cheaper. Many public schools only buy "classroom" sets because making sure every child can take home a textbook is too expensive. On a side note, many schools no longer let student use lockers to store items, so book storage is also a problem if every student is expected to manage 6-8 books. I also believe textbook costs tip the scales of "no homework" policies. Furthermore, it is deal dependent whether or not you can photocopy consumable materials so you don't need to repurchase entire workbooks at 10x the price of a photo copy.
The only "added value" I see in the corporate publishers is they may come with proprietary web portals to serve "enhanced" content. Digital access commonly does not last as long as a school may keep a textbook.
An especially egregious textbook publisher tactic at the university level is to require school work be submitted digitally and the access portal can only be accessed with an key from a new, current edition textbook. They even go so far as to invalidate unused keys from previous editions (some only 1 or 2 years old) that were not used.
I can see a case for specialty texts, but that's about it.
What I get from this is a large number of users are likely illegally hosting and distributing media on a platform (Plex) that phones home and rats them out?
Or else...
Why would Plex block an entire ISP for behavior that cannot be proved comes from Plex servers using the IPS?
Excellent argument!
Once I pay for and eat a McDonald's combo will it cost me millions to switch to Burger King? Will McDonald's start charging extra for salt on my fries simply because I can no longer afford to switch to Burger King who still offers "free" salt?
You're very incorrect. Plenty of people at Microsoft care about linking your mug shot to any other internet/technology presence they can to create a larger data profile on you to monetize.
My work account tied into M$ doesn't have my picture. I told my boss when the US has better privacy laws and user protections, I'd do it. I didn't choose to work for a company to help M$ or any other 3rd party build a profile on me, nor should I have to. And don't come back with "just find another job", that's a straw-man argument. The whole point of this is tech companies with too much power to force people into doings things they'd rather not (like massive data harvesting and selling said data) because there really isn't a viable alternative or our government refuses to protect it's citizens.
Google may have been the best search engine and preferred by most internet users due to the quality of search results. But once they had billions of dollars to spend and are really just an advertising company, they started using tactics to prey on users lack of concern or difficulty to choose another search engine, especially in the mobile arena, by paying to have Google as the default search engine.
If Google is still so desirable, they why do they pay billions of dollars to be the default? Wouldn't users intentionally seek out Google and set it as the default if it were not already so?
It genuinely confuses me that corporations have this kind of logic. i.e. The way for Google to stay desirable as a search provider that users choose to use it to force it on them?
My U.S. company switched from Cisco WebEx to Teams in 2020 because Teams was "free" with all of our other M$ stuff. Zoom was clobbering Teams in the video conference market, so M$ quickly implemented more features and integrations for "free" with existing M$ bundle. Now that M$ has gotten enough corporate users, it has implemented price tiers for certain Teams features, even moving some out of free. To me, this is clearly monopoly-like market abuse.
Duopoly problem.
$98 billion just in fees... talk about dragging down the economy.
So the credit card model of making money on the interest against my loan is not enough? They also need to take a cut of the transaction from the merchant for the privilege to allow customers to easily take out more loan money to for the CC company to make more money from increased or revolving loan amount?
How hard would it be to create a mandatory open processing standard for point of sales terminals to accept any secure card that meets the standard? Then the cards can compete on features and services.
I can hardly wait to subscribe to Mac OS on whatever hardware/platform I'd like too!
This is part of my main gripe with Apple. Simply put from Apple, "A 'walled garden' of both hardware and software is the only way to protect and provide the best experience for users". Except it wasn't and isn't. iTunes was allowed on Windows to sync iPODs, pretty much from day one, because money. They knew there was no way potential customers were going to switch to MACs to simply own an iPOD; they had to tap the Windows market or continue to struggle. Being able to steal digital music was also a key component. And because of that, we now have the success of Apple mobile hardware and streaming services, all because of a more open, cross compatibility approach to get iPods into the market.
AppleTV was only on their hardware until their hardware wasn't selling as well as the likes of Roku and AndroidTV by a wide enough margin. And when iPhone and iPAD sales are not what the used to be, Apple TV is on Roku, AndroidTV et. al., to increase the subscriber base to generate more money. At the end of the day, it's all about the money, not their ethos of design or experience or whatever else they claim.
The real lesson here is: the "walled garden" approach will only get you so far.
Good for the UK!
I only wish so many people in the U.S. didn't believe it's their god given right to create mountains of plastic trash or fuel their cars with "recycled dinosaurs".
Lego is starting to switch away from their plastic packaging, but their manuals are still a problem. All too often, they use too many pages for steps that could have easily been printed on a single page. While their core product is made of plastic, I can't ever remember when I intentionally threw a single Lego in the trash going back to the 1980s.
Cannon: Reset!
Inigo Montoya: I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage. -- Ambrose Bierce