Digital Rights Misery: When Technology Is Designed to Fail

Alexander Hoffman (apparently) - 03:26am May 16, 2008 PST
via email

There were a few things bugging me as I read this article, but I
won't get into all of them. I had trouble putting my finger on the
first one until I read this part:

Jeff Porten Wrote:
>there is nothing unethical about Columbia Pictures attempting
>to charge me $12 to watch a movie in a hotel room. What is
>unethical, in my view, is the crippling of essential technologies
>for the sole purpose of allowing that $12 tax on the technologically
>unsophisticated to exist.

Jeff is trying to support his central premise by acting as though the
entire marketplace is run by a single entity. He's ignoring the fact
the various different outlets are run by different firms,
organizations and entities. The pricing at the DVD kiosk, the iTunes
Store and Sprint TV are set in separately. Yes, they are set in a
world where the others exist, but they are not set together.

Jeff allows for some charge for convenience, but he does not weigh it
strongly enough. Nor does he recognize that most people are willing
to pay more so they don't have be bothered -- especially so they
don't have to be bothered to learn something.

I could fix my car myself, if I bothered to learn how to do it. But
that was never worth it to me.

Far too often, I pay for someone else to cook me a dinner, when I
know I could make it better and cheaper myself. (There are plenty of
meals I pay for that I couldn't make myself, but as a New Yorker, I
order too much mediocre food delivered.)

Painting a room takes some skill, but not so much that we couldn't
learn it ourselves. How many people have paid others to paint their
house/apartment?

So, Jeff is tech savvy enough to know how easy it is for some people
to learn this stuff. He knows about Slingbox and that it's probably
easy to set up. But most people would rather not be bothered. They'd
rather not be bothered to learn. And they have a good reason for
this. While setting up a Slingbox might not be hard most of the time,
trouble shooting when something goes wrong can be quite demanding.

Learning enough to be confident that you can make sure it works take
a LOT of knowledge, and most people are willing to pay extra money so
they don't have to be bothered to learn all that.

************************

Jeff writes as though this is some kind of conspiracy.

>the crippling of essential technologies
>for the sole purpose of allowing that $12 tax on the technologically
>unsophisticated to exist.

I don't think that this is what is going on. Rather I think that some
people/firms are trying to find ways to take advantage of a situation
that has been created by the incompetence of the tech industry.

I don't think that these things are intentionally hard to use, set up
or trouble shoot. Instead, I think that engineers create products for
themselves well, and for others poorly.

Other phones are every one of the iPhone's abilities before the
iPhone. Apple products rarely have more or better features. But they
are more usable. Apple gets what other companies don't, that
usability matters more than feature lists.

The iPod killers that don't prove this point for me. Rival companies
really DO want to supplant the iPod. They aren't pulling their
punches because it suits them to make hard to use products. They
aren't failing because they they want to charge more. They are
failing because they don't know how to succeed.

Note that NBC did not pull out of the iTunes Store because it worked.
Rather, they wanted to charge differentially based on the value of
content, which Jeff does not have a problem with. They are not
intentionally crippling technologies to ensure higher prices on the
technologically unsophisticated. If they could make it easy enough to
expand the market, they would.


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=Alex Hoffman
Leadership, Policy & Politics
Teachers College, Columbia University