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Originally Posted by Walk Broad
No monopoly has ever been good for the consumer.
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So we agree
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But at the same time, we have to understand this is the cost of doing business for the things we want/need/like. As we continue down the electronic age, I'm sure this issue will come up again.
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That is where we differ - you can do business in two ways. Either you can simply aim for middle or short term profit or for long term profit - and I am very sorry to see that most companies aim for the first.
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The best we can do is to continue to rally for change or not purchase from said companies and protect ourselves as best we can.
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That is what I wanted to achieve. You can only force business into something helpful for yourself by not buying there.
So - abandoning shops/publishers/etc using DRM or trying to enforce a monopol would actually be a way to get nicer formats, better service, etc
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ePub / HTML are great universal formats, but all corporations exist to increase the wealth of the shareholders. If they can get more people onto a proprietary system the better to lock in their profits by locking in customers.
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That is again not true in my opinion - have a look at the current development of open document standards vs the previous closed standards. It is the same for the music or for office formats - they are switching to open standards because closed standards are really no way to go. Not even if you try to hold customers...
I dont know why CEOs and share holders still believe in "closed formats" - there is actually no sense in them.
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It's simple business economics. They really don't give a rat's patotey about longetivity. In their corporate mind, their corporation is going to be around forever anyway. None of them "plan" to go out of business.
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Yeah. And none of them think for the next 5 years - at least thats my current view of the problem ...
And pissing off your customers really is not a good business strategy. As "company founder seminars" keep repeating ... One completely satisfied customer means three customers won. One annoyed customer means seven customers lost.
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Looking at it from their perspective (short-term, profit motivated) why should they use a more open standard? Because it is the kinder, gentler thing?
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Yeah. Short-term motivation is one of the key problems of todays economy. Oh well, that's not the topic here
It seems we agree in quite a number of positions. And as long as we both agree that monopols or market-domination are bad things, I can live with it