Do you see a common theme among hard drive manufacturers lowering waranties, nVidia not coming up with drivers for a far-from-dead OS platform, AMD finding PR a substitute for action, and BAPCo stonewalling?
I do. All of these dis the customer. All of these presume the customer is a rather bovine being hardly worthy of respect. Sheep. Cattle.
Now before you go find the newest circle jerk in a forum and tell each other how important you are, aren’t at least many of these items aimed primarily at you?
There’s something very funny about watching people proclaim “We rule” while being relieved upon.
Libertarians, Rejoice!
For all you libertarians out there, you really ought to like this. Let the market rule! Well, the market is ruling alright, ruling over you. This is what happens when the big libertarians face off against the little libertarians. The big fish eat the little fish.
Let’s take these hard drive warranties. You can say, “I’ll buy IBM.” And that’s fine, for the moment. But what if IBM/Fujitsu joins the crowd today or tomorrow? What do you do then? Buy a SCSI drive and reward the miscreants with even more money?
What do you do when you run out of choices?
From The Company’s Standpoint
Libertarian or not, these companies obviously feel they can get away with this, simply because they don’t see any organized opposition.
Any unbiased look at this community would find an anarchic group that seems to only generally agree that digital copying is a good thing. 🙂
Take anything else, and no matter how what the problem is, no matter how legitimate it is, there will always be self-appointed corporate (rhymes with lass tickers) who, for reasons known only to God and themselves, will fight to the last electron in virtual denial.
Besides that, whoever came up with “all talk, no action” must have known the Internet was coming.
At most, one of these folks will send an email to a company saying he won’t buy from them anymore, and from the language, you’d think the writer fully expects the CEO not only to hear about it, but instantly lose control of his bowels or worse when he does.
Uhhh . . . no.
Case Study: The R9700
A consumer can’t do very much by not buying a company’s product. Consumers can.
But when I occasionally suggest that this might be a good idea, or even just an act of rational self-protection, one would think I was the reincarnation of Lenin from a few of the emails I get.
Far more importantly, the general response is . . . silence.
Just a few days ago, I suggested that people interested in buying an R9700 just WAIT a little while until ATI straightens out the 8X AGP situation, just to avoid potential problems.
Incidentally, something I’m beginning to see is when I suggest corrective action, even fairly nicely, it’s an act of hate. Teachers are in for a rough time. 🙂
It was interesting to see the reaction over at the Rage3D forums. More than a few saw it as a reasonable, sane precaution, but a few corporate lass tickers thought it (or for that matter, any statement indicating a problem) to be little short of terrorism.
They often cited one example of the card working on an 8X motherboard and ignored the dozens of cases where it didn’t. They called statements they didn’t like “rumors.” They said, “it works on mine, end of story.” Pretty amazing to watch.
What compels these people???
More importantly, though, the rest of the hardware world provided . . . the silence of the lambs.
What To Do?
I honestly don’t know. We can point these things out, but it’s certainly going to take a much bigger and well-financed organization than ourselves to do something serious about this.
In the meantime, though, in situation where it’s appropriate, you might want to ask, and keep asking at least the more extreme corporate lass tickers, “Why are you doing this? Why do you so identify with a company that you’re even more extreme than the people who work for it? Why are you denying problems even the company admits to like your life depended on it?”
I am sure this isn’t a matter of hired trolls; for one thing, hired trolls would be able to spell. 🙂 You might ask, “Why do you do all this volunteer work for this corporation?”
Finally, you might ask those staying quiet, “Are you going to say anything about this, and if not, why not?”
All I can say is that companies will jerk you around until a ton of you (plural, big plural) tell them altogether that you won’t be, and back it up not only with your mouths, but also your wallets. The sooner most realize that, the better, and that’s going to take organization.
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