shady business practices

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

ccb at valinux.com  writes:

| > (Ideaological trivia test question: Name some more Marxist ideas that
| > are now considered correct in the Capitalist world.  No cheating now;
| > try answering without rereading your Marx.  Stay on topic  by  giving
| > example in the computer industry. Turn in your answers by Friday. ;-)
|
| While you were reading Marx, I was reading Nietzsche ;-).

They're  both  pretty  thick  reading,  no?    Of   course,   English
translations  from  the  German  tend to be that way.  With my couple
years of high-school German, I found that I could follow the original
of both nearly as easily as the English versions. Maybe it's because,
with the German version, I'd keep saying "I don't know what that word
means"  and look it up.  With your native language, you tend to think
that you understand the words even when you don't, and you don't stop
to look them up.

| Now why do I have to pay extra for "Touch Tone(tm)" dialing?

There's an interesting concept here from Consumer Reports:  They  use
the  term  "mandatory option" to refer to something that is listed as
an option, but you can't actually get (or use)  the  product  without
paying for the option.  I've read that in some areas, there's a touch
tone charge for cell phones, although you can't actually buy  a  dial
cell phone.

The Consumer Reports use of this term brings out the fact  that  this
isn't  just  a  case  of  Evil  Government  Regulation;  it is common
business practice that effects a great many products.   It  tends  to
appear  when  the  customers  are  especially price conscious, and is
mostly a way of making the advertised price look better.

Another good phone company example  is  the  nearly  universal  extra
charge  for  an  unlisted  number.   The usual excuse is that it's an
exception, which is expensive.  But this is  bogus,  because  whether
your  number  is listed is merely a flag in an accounting record.  It
costs the phone company exactly the same to set that flag either way.
When  your  account  is  started; each is just one keystroke or mouse
click.  The actual printing is, of  course,  totally  automated,  and
there's  no  marginal cost for the computer to take the true or false
branch of the test.  There's a tiny marginal cost to  print  the  one
line in a physical phone book, so it's cheaper to not print an entry.
But the charge is typically a buck or two per month for the  one-time
labor  of  setting  the flag to false, although the unlisted entry is
marginally cheaper for the phone company.

Back when we still had Sys/V to kick around, one of the more annoying
options  was  the extra charge for a license for more than two users.
Again, this was merely a one-byte flag  hidden  in  a  binary  config
file,  which  was read by the login process.  There was a significant
extra charge to get this flag turned off.  Like the NT limit  to  the
number  of  TCP  connections, this was based on the secrecy of config
file formats.  But unlike NT's TCP limit, which was designed to block
the  use  of non-MS web servers, the Sys/V login limit was an example
of pure lowballing con game. You sell the suckers a multi-user system
with  the  multi-user capabilities crippled by special code.  Many of
the customers will think "I'm the only one who will be using it"  and
not understand why one person needs a multi-user license. They'll pay
the lower price, and then you can hit them up with a charge to change
that  one  byte  when  they  finally  understand why one user needs a
multi-user license.

Such tricks may be legal, but they sure can leave a bad taste in your
mouth.

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