Would you be willing to buy programmable specs that would adjust to external conditions, distance, and rate of change of cornea with time? Of course, you will need to buy a microscope to read the programming instructions on the side in case you misplace the hard copy ones, that is, if you can find your glasses to find the instructions or the microscope.
At some point open depends on closed, and closed actually means open. How is the situation being viewed, from the outside looking in, or from the inside looking out?
I don't accept the premise. How many financially opens are there? All open initiatives have to close to survive and all closed ones have to stay closed or be closed.
All technology companies add functionality to their wares until they become bloated or counter productive. Very difficult to keep it simple, and that is independent of open or closed.
Service providers especially need to be compensated when they must pay out capital to remain operational. As for, "You have to make people pay in order to get something good," the corollary is not always true. I.e., it is not always true that when you pay you always get something that is good.
It is always true eventually, for in a competitive regime, the lucrativeness of the willingness to pay eventually will be exploited.
Especially when limited choices from an even more limited number of suppliers force a selection because it's the only option available.
The only limitations which cause the market to evolve into such a constrained state come from government intrusion.
Or worse, when there are no options available to satisfy the customer's real requirements because the desired options would cause the sole provider(s) to undergo catastrophic disruption.
A market with a sole provider is a result of government edicts seeking to create a competitive market. Free markets can't be created by fiat, but do arise by the natural will of men to profit.
But here we are talking about the iPhone device as it would be used in developed nations, not some least-common-denominator solution for a sub-saharan village that runs off a magneto or a manually powered gen set.
I see no difference between that market and the one of San Francisco; only the layout is different, for, the iComE device is independent of layouts since it doesn't required specialized knowledge to operate and can be learned intuitively(fiddling with it). Contrast that flat learning curve to the curve of automatic programmable eyeglasses that would replace three pairs of specs. The difference arises in narrowly unusable products and disappears in broadly usable markets.
However, if you look at the design of the 100 dollar laptop that is almost ready to ship to developing nations, one finds some of the same iPhone features and capabilities, albeit at the most essential levels. And in some regions solar powered electrical stations are already being prepared for use. With time, your observation "if the cost to add extra functionality is infinitesimal as it seems is the case, there's no reason not to add it"will hold true, even in Negroponte boxes and the power sources that feed them.
Agreed. AAPL can be closed anywhere and iComE can succeed everywhere.
Some of the value that I receive from Skype transcend its free sticker price, almost placing those experiences in a different dimension of consideration.
Is it free or are the payers not apparent?
In certain modes it facilitates an end to end solution, even if the middle doesn't belong to it, designed to meet users' needs like none other that I am aware of to date. Last month, for example, I found myself on Skype chatting with an netizen friend who was on a return trip from a wireless conference in Stockholm while aboard a jet that was traveling over the Atlantic at approximately 35,000 ft.
Is that an example of Skype's added value?
At one point in our conversation he asked if I'd mind returning to the call after he attended to another caller that was bidding for his ears (and eyes), which turned out to be a two-way video call - although, he confessed to not using a camera during the flight. The interloping caller, btw, was a fellow employee of his who was on assignment in Panama. To round out the scene, I was sitting in my den, in Brooklyn.
My guess is there was no added value to either of you since it was free. However, maybe I'm wrong but to be convinced, I'd like to know who actually paid for the communication.
I'd pay a monthly fee, or even a per-event on, for such capabilities if it were reasonably tied to a cost base and allowed the company a profit.
That has to be the case in a free market. Competition forces it to be so. In a competitive market open has to close.
Some would even argue that I'm already indirectly paying that fee today through my monthly "broadband" (geesh, I hate that word) subscription to Time Warner's RR service.
ah hah!
In any event, I wouldn't, under normal circumstances, extend myself to the point of meeting the financial demands of most sat-phone operators who are still operating from within silos. It's the departure from silos towards open fields that comprises the fuzzy math that increasingly defines today's communications-related (and many other) business models.
Schumpeter's death, the outcome of the inferior in any galaxy. Without death there's no room made for the superior.
Considering that there are tens of millions of registered Skype users (as I type this reply, a quick glance at my screen tells me 6,002,699 individuals are presently using it - sometimes that number reaches into the thirty million area) and it doesn't pay for transport, I think the user base is sufficient to amortize such a "reasonable" fee, if not one that was ridiculously low, in comparative terms. Value then accrues in other ways, usually based on the number of subscribers, or participants, a service claims, and from that point on defining a business model is a wide open affair.
Your prescription seems too "fuzzy" to pay the bills and last in a competitive environment.
It's becoming increasingly difficult to relate to, and compare, value propositions based on historical precedent alone. Moving away from voice, how much did it cost an architect to subscribe to a GIS service that provided global maps and photos with tree-top detail five years ago? Today it's "free," by most measures of the term "free," but is it really free? Is the apparent freeness of Google Earth something that must be put under a microscope and questioned, just as Skype's voice services have been, just because a couple of hundred GIS outfits may have been impacted by it? The point here is, those GIS firms will either enhance their businesses because of Google Earth, or they will fold, depending on their ability to adapt.
They will fold as you have pointed out, because nothing is free, and they have to find a way to make it unfree. |
