Accidental Tech Podcast670: Institutionally Inescapable
https://atp.fm/670
We all just wish our families would be more impressed by our TVs.
Soperman@atpfm just got around to the episode, and I just want to point out that John’s idea that market competition is enough to motivate companies to provide better service is pretty outdated, if not outright false, for a lot of very complicated economics reasons. The simplest one is that there is always a sort of prisoner’s dilemma where companies realize that if they all offer the same level of bad service, they can all cut costs (1/2)
@atpfm (2/2) John actually mentioned a good example of this, which is with airlines. 20 years ago (and even today if you fly internationally) you had a dozen different airline choices to reach any major destination, and yet my memory as someone who flew 4-5 times a year with my family was that they all had bad service. You have a similar situation with washing machines nowadays. Companies m refuse to act in their own long-term best interest when they can superficially increase short-term profits
@atpfm (3/2 thought I had more space in the previous posts lol) It’s also important to note that in this case there are plenty of publically accessible (and even free) alternatives for storing your data or for services that you can even host yourself, meaning there is technically massive competition for companies like Apple, but that’s still not enough.
All of which is to say that *sometimes* for markets to work properly the government has to intervene and force companies not to not be dumb
John Siracusa@soperman First, you likely didn’t have a dozen airlines to choose from for the particular source and destination for your desired flight (see Casey’s Delta/United example). Second, there has been considerable consolidation in the airline industry in the past several decades, reducing choice and worsening service, so the example is apt.
@siracusa my family flew from SF to Tel Aviv to visit family in Israel pretty often, and I do remember us trying literally 10 different airlines that all had similar costs and travel times to get there…
But I asked my parents to find the old tickets and while I was technically correct, they all had different layovers in different cities, and there weren’t many options for direct flights to any specific city, which was your guys’ point. Sorry for being snarky
@siracusa In hindsight my original post was kind of condescending which I’m sorry about, and I wish I’d been more thoughtful. But I still don’t think competition solves any of the problems you guys were describing with the Apple accounts, because even now alternatives exist but people want their stuff consolidated and integrated with all of their tools because it’s convenient, and that still means one company can ruin your digital life
@siracusa and once you’re “locked in” to one company, while you could move to another one the cost of switching can be really high or impossible. I know it was to illustrate a different point, but Casey gave the example of Declan wanting to use google slides instead of keynote despite having easier access to keynote because he didn’t want to force him to relearn how to do things (which is totally valid, but also my point). And of course that assumes feature parity and it being easy to switch etc
@siracusa but that in turn means companies don’t have to worry as much about service, and also that it’s potentially a wasted investment since most people won’t want to switch anyway, which is why you’d need laws to ensure people actually own their data
(And I think this applies to various extents for any market where it’s hard to switch or hard to manage, like with household appliances for example)
@siracusa sorry for all of this text, I just minored in economics in college and one of my favorite professors really hammered home the fact that even though competition is often taught as the primary incentive for companies, it’s ultimately just one component and the impact of competition on a company depends heavily on a variety of other product- and context-specific factors