Silicon Valley Values Shift To Customersploitation

theodp writes "Bill Davidow is the real Silicon Valley deal. Commenting on how Silicon Valley has changed over the decades, Davidow is not impressed, dishing out harsh words for Facebook, Apple, Google, and others. 'When corporate leaders pursue wealth in the winner-take-all Internet environment,' concludes Davidow, 'companies dance on the edge of acceptable behavior. If they don't take it to the limit, a competitor will. That competitor will become the dominant supplier — one monopoly will replace another. And when you engage in these activities you get a different set of Valley values: the values of customer exploitation.'"

"Customersploitation"

[Chrisq]

come on - give me a break.

Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

The incentive to create a business is to make money. Once your market saturation crosses a tipping point, the only way to further increase profits is to exploit, rather than serve your market. So you engage in monopolization, rent-seeking, and so on.

This is how business has always worked. This is an entirely predictable outcome of basic human nature. It should not be surprising at all. Nor, for the most part, should it be upsetting. We should simply expect that once the businesses get huge like this, we will have to either break them up or heap some government regulation on them in order to protect ourselves from them. We will *always* have to do this, so, let's get busy.

Not likely

[geek]

How are the exploited if they are signing up willingly? Trying to negate personal responsibility and play it off on the "evil corporation" is more played out than the buzzwords Davidow uses in his "blog."

I agree companies take things a bit too far at times but like a wise man once said "It's a crime to let a sucker hang on to his money." I feel no worse for people being "exploited" by these companies than I do the banks that gambled on them.

Re:ok, like IBM and others didn't exploit customer

[alen]

nobody is forcing you to use facebook, google, twitter or any free internet service. i use them because i get value out of them.

oh noes, facebook knows i liked the page of some women's perfume my wife likes. its so evil the perfume maker may even send me a custom coupon before my wife's birthday because they will have her info as well.

Define 'exploited'

[Picass0]

Some people at slashdot look at Apple and it's walled garden app store and feel like Apple is creating a trapped audience who can only download what Apple feels is OK.

And they are right. But some people who want a simple "it just works" device are willing to accept that model and they don't care about concepts like open source.

I'll extend that to many of IT professionals who have spent years getting the dreaded "my computer is broken" phone calls. They have pointed friends and family in Apple's direction because... it's just works.

Grandma doesn't build her own kernel. She doesn't see a walled garden. She sees a device that works without throwing a ton of alarming messages at her.

Re:Not likely

[StatureOfLiberty]

"How are the exploited if they are signing up willingly?"

I agree. But, I would add this.

We have been busy educating the perfect consumer. One who always sees a want as being a need. One who can't perceive true value. One who cannot weigh risk vs. benefit. One who asks no questions and just forks over the money. Preferably in some recurring revenue fashion.

We are educating perfect voters too. No analytical skills. Just cheerleaders willing to forward stupid emails and keep up with today's talking points at most. Then pull the straight ticket lever come election day. It is really sad.

You know what I am going to do about this?

[Keyslapper]

"Nothing! Because if I take it to small claims court, it will just drain 8 hours out of my life and you probably won't show up and even if I got the judgment you'd just stiff me anyway; so what I am going to do is piss and moan like an impotent jerk, and then bend over and take it up the tailpipe!"
-- Fletcher (Jim Carrey) "Liar, Liar"

Different scenario, same outcome.

diff:customer,consumer

[Ralph Spoilsport]

There's a difference between a customer and a consumer, and I think that is what the article is dancing around. There is a political corrolary to this, the difference between a citizen and a tax payer. We can see how this devolution from citizen/customer to consumer/taxpayer has taken place. A customer has a relationship with the provider and has some agency with the provider. A consumer is more infantilised, more of a "feeder", and has less agency. This also feeds the monopolisation trend he discusses - customers are empowered to go elsewhere, consumers, less so. Consumers are happy with whatever gizmos the monopolists provide them, and have a dramatically different set of expectations than a customer does. Citizens are empowered and informed. They may not be correct (in my vision of the world, but, it takes all kinds...) but they are actively involved with their neighbourhoods, communities, localities and nation-states. Taxpayers are not. Taxpayers are consumers of government services and see themselves as alienated from the systems of service provision. And as consumers, they want what all infantilised consumers want:

Something for nothing.

Napster simply provided exactly what the consumer had been demanding all along and what was native to the enframing of digital technology itself: copies of data, for free (or nearly free). Something for nothing. A customer would have been much more wary of such a proposition, but consumers are like honey badgers, they don't give a shit.

So, as interesting a lament as the article is, in fact, it points at large issues it cannot address (customer v. consumer) and also the disappearance of HP and its way of doing business. My wife worked at HP for 25 years, so I have some insight on this as well. The HP way started to collapse in the 1990s and took a BIG hit in 2001 with Carli Fiorina's incompetent reign at HP 1999 - 2006. She and her cohorts dismantled HP and the HP Way part by part, and basically gutted the company. Now it is basically a subsidiary of Compaq, even though it's called HP, most of the important decisions are coming out of Texas, not Palo Alto. I remember hearing back in 2000 how the HP way was under attack and people lamenting the "good old days" at HP. I think the article has a lot of that nostalgia clouding its view.

How we get out of the infinite regress of infantile consumerism remains to be seen. I am thinking that when oil production goes into a permanent decline after 2017, that's going to evacuate a lot of wealth that was being pissed away on meaningless junk, and people will have to snap to attention and get on the stick or experience enormous suffering. At that point, the ICT industry will evolve customers and relationships. How that will evolve out of the massive monopolisation process from above seems unlikely, so I would think it will have to come from below as consumers empower themselves back into being customers working with companies to get (work/play/etc.) done, and then become citizens who are compassionate and contributing active members of a society instead of taxpayers griping about "the gubmint".

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

Adapt to what? The fact that you basically own the market? That doesn't make sense.

You want to extract more profit from a market that almost entirely buys from you already. Spending company resources on busting into brand-new markets is high risk with an unclear potential payoff. Adjusting your offerings such that people must pay more for the same service, or adjusting the law such that it is even more expensive (or illegal) to use alternatives, is far less risky with clearer gains.

The choice is obvious.