Donald Lindsay's Weblog

By now most of the tech savvy readers have discovered the Phenomenal T-Mobile Fail. There will be alot of talk about the dubiousness of cloud computing and a thorough round of pat-pats and maybe a few choice quotes from The Wealth Of Nations.

We know. However, the rabbit hole goes deeper than that, so grab your canary cage and your flashlight and lets take a little stroll.

The Phenomenal T-Mobile Fail, hereafter referred to as the PTMF, is only a symptom of a much deeper problem, mainly the mythologicalization of corporate representation.

First, there is the issue that a corporation is given rights because of the collective interests of it’s ‘parties’, yet somehow those interests are somehow unliablized to actually convince the ‘parties’ that they should waste their own voices, votes or calories to see those interests protected, like the rest of us. But let’s put that aside for the moment. You will see this material again.

The legitimate problem facing business is that the commodity model of software marketing doesn’t work. Software isn’t a commodity and you can’t make a profit treating it as such. The reasons are myriad, but it boils down to two factors, 1) the nearly free cost of duplication and 2) the very fast depression of price due to competition. An economist could probably explain it better. However, this nutshell version is that development costs for software are largely up-front and sunk by the time the software hits the market. Support and upgrades are attempts by the company to continue to make profit from the product after the initial offering to the market but recovery of sunk cost depends on alot of factors that can’t be controlled and, increasingly, lead to the near plummet of a particular version’s value as competition and innovation respond. What’s a company to do?

Retreat behind the firewall. Microsoft is doing it, Google is doing it, alot of companies are doing it. Hoard the hardware, because in the world of computers, the hardware holds it’s value longer. And, for profit, the companies are wanting you to leave the sticky hardware problems to them while they deliver the subscription to you. It’s a defensive position adopted because, although when knowledge was scarce, it’s products could be sold as a commodity, when knowledge is plentiful, the hardware is where the value is.

Case in point: Apple sells the iPhone much harder than MacBooks anymore, Apple is retreating behind the firewall. Microsoft is opening up to Open Source, the sunk cost of software development has become higher than the profit margin of rarified MS expertise with it’s own products and the government is not sympathetic to rationalizations of draconian methods to insure quality and market percentage points. And it isn’t necessarily because wages and ‘other costs’ are higher, although, especially for American workers, it’s a factor, but because the market share is too large to be nimble and the average user’s knowledge and ability is, too. Workers and home users are much, much, more confident and savvy than 10 years ago, able to adapt to and adopt innovations and put them quickly to productive work.

That said, let’s return to the first part of this essay. We might hope that society, writ-large, is awakening to a simple conundrum that has become the equivelent to a dead cat in the room, and rather than crack open the history books, I’ll state two facts:

1) A person can run a red light, potential putting the lives of humans at risk and usually pay a fine of less than $300 and be on their way within minutes.

2) A person can copy a song from a download site putting less than $2 of corporate profit at risk and have to pay $50,000 and be tied up in litigation for months.

This doesn’t really appear, on the face of it, to represent equal protection of the laws. It makes you consider how the law has been construed to value human life and, perhaps, that we have yet to see the end of the consequences of the policies that have led to the Great Recession, as it is sometimes called, and, I believe, the mythicalization of corporation. Does working for Microsoft or Google entitle you to twice the legal protection as the person who doesn’t work for large corporations? Why isn’t there a well-known and funded IT union with it’s own voice and lobby? How did the interests of employees and employers diverge so widely that a company would be entitled to legal protections against the disinterest of employees in the vision of management?

The answers could be interesting, to say the least, but the asking we should never tire of.

Your actual mileage may vary.

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