Mobile My Ass
I know a lot of people who don't live around here. Today it occurred to me that it would make sense to have a cell phone plan where I have unlimited anytime calling to five local numbers, plus a couple of hundred minutes' worth of miscellany. I can then use phone cards with local access numbers to translate this in to cheap unlimited long distance on a cell phone -- $30 per month to the wireless provider and then a few cents per minute calling anywhere in the world, paying the long-distance provider as I go along. I get a more flexible billing system that better suits me and two non-competing companies get paid for offering specialized services. Everyone wins.
The catch is that my cell phone provider won't let me switch to that kind of plan without signing myself into a new 3-year contract. I don't even expect to be living in this country in three years, so it's not going to happen. The world is now a little worse off because of their grasping mania to make their future look good on paper. This is an example of the general phenomenon that most businesses don't understand the underlying reasons behind why they make money: they just try to guess what is or will be "hot" and mindlessly emulate with only random and superficial variations.
But you'd think it wouldn't take a genius to understand that mobile phones dominated rapidly despite being more expensive than landlines because people like mobility and will pay for it. I'd pay them an extra $10 per month to have the option of shutting off my service any given month for a reasonable fee, and I doubt their net cashflows would end up being the worse for it if they offered this kind of price/commitment trade-off. You have to accept small-scale instability to gain it at the large scale; by grasping at the illusion of security you typically come up empty-handed.
The catch is that my cell phone provider won't let me switch to that kind of plan without signing myself into a new 3-year contract. I don't even expect to be living in this country in three years, so it's not going to happen. The world is now a little worse off because of their grasping mania to make their future look good on paper. This is an example of the general phenomenon that most businesses don't understand the underlying reasons behind why they make money: they just try to guess what is or will be "hot" and mindlessly emulate with only random and superficial variations.
But you'd think it wouldn't take a genius to understand that mobile phones dominated rapidly despite being more expensive than landlines because people like mobility and will pay for it. I'd pay them an extra $10 per month to have the option of shutting off my service any given month for a reasonable fee, and I doubt their net cashflows would end up being the worse for it if they offered this kind of price/commitment trade-off. You have to accept small-scale instability to gain it at the large scale; by grasping at the illusion of security you typically come up empty-handed.