Mark Your Calendars?
Via Susie Madrak, a post on the MSNBC technology blog about a possible shut down on January 23rd by Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others over the pending SOPA legislation.
GoDaddy has already lost about 35,000 accounts after it came out in support for SOPA [the ‘Stop On-line Piracy Act’] by people who have read the law and object to it.
This is another attempt by the half dozen media conglomerates to harass their customers who refuse to buy the over-priced garbage that the corporations are attempting to push. The bill aims to make ISPs agents of the media conglomerates.
If the media companies would like to put a dent in real piracy, they might consider not having their CD/DVD operations located in China. The same warning goes to the ‘designer labels’ pushing their over-priced trash. If it is produced in China, it will be copied, often by the same company that makes the ‘real’ product.
If you out-source the production of your product, you have lost control of the product.
5 comments
I don’t understand it. Even that old quasi-Nazi Henry Ford somehow comprehended that even his employees (and in today’s world, one might add, stockholders) could be customers, but only if business in the U.S. is sufficiently supported that employees (and stockholders) have the necessary income. It is not for no reason that my income has plummeted to nearly zero; someone, somewhere, is doing the same work I used to do, for a lot less money… and employers seem able to persuade themselves that the consequences are limited to lower production costs, ignoring their loss of a customer base.
If only China manufactures DVDs (legal or otherwise), only the Chinese will be able to afford DVDs. Despite the loudest protests from our most conservative business “leaders,” there is no such thing as a free lunch, and that’s what they are looking for when they outsource and offshore technology-related work of any sort, including manufacturing. Yes, damn them, I do blame them.
They just don’t understand that some kid downloading a lousy copy of a recent movie isn’t their problem – it’s people buying the movies through legitimate outlets that were made at the same factory, from the same master, but they aren’t getting paid for them.
When you lose control of your product, you have nothing to sell, because factories in other countries couldn’t care less about your ‘intellectual property rights’, only about their profit margin. Hell, they run one shift for the products you get to sell, and two shifts to make the product you get nothing from.
When you out-source customer service, you have lost your best connection to your customer base.
The current crop of CEOs are morons. They don’t understand what they lose when they out-source, they don’t understand the real ‘costs’ of doing it.
There were floods in Thailand, so you can’t get hard drives. The current ‘capitalist’ system has adopted the worst features of the old Soviet system, including single-sourcing individual components.
But can’t you also blame consumers who want the cheapest product and to bleep with the “Made in America’? There is no shortage of server-grade SAS drives. They’re made just down the street from me in the same Western Digital factory that used to make consumer drives back in the 1980’s. But businesses are willing to pay Made in America prices for SAS drives, whereas if WD tried making consumer drives there again, nobody would buy it because it’d be $20 more expensive, and $20 in consumer drives might as well be a poison pill, it doesn’t matter that it’s made in America and the competitor isn’t, people just would not buy it, believe me, I’ve seen the sales numbers, cost is the *only* thing in consumer drives.
Oh sure, I know that people *say* they want to buy stuff made in America, but the proof is in whether they’re willing to put their money where their mouth is. There’s an underwear company that had a factory in a small town in Louisiana. Their packages displayed a proud “Made in America” label at Sears and Wal-Mart and everywhere else underwear sold, but didn’t sell anywhere near as well as the 50-cents-cheaper package of underwear made in Vietnam while not making as much profit as the competitor’s underwear made in Vietnam. So they finally shut down their factory in Louisiana and moved production to Thailand. What were they supposed to do, given that the consumers voted with their dollars to support Vietnam, rather than America?
Businesses are just giving Americans what they apparently want. If consumers don’t seem to care about supporting America, why *should* business care?
– Badtux the Contrarian Penguin
By defgault theses idiots are creating powers that the same idiots would (maybe, if they cared that is ) decry in an oppressive regime:
On a lighter note is this the future of anti piracy adverts?
http://thepoormouth.blogspot.com/2012/01/piracy-waning-for-sopa-age.html
I think is was more down to manufacturers than consumers, Badtux, because I used WD drives all the time when I was building boxes because they had better specs, especially MTBF that the Seagates, which were more prevalent in SoCal. I’ll make a point of buying WDs for my new machine, now that I know.
On the Win box side everyone jumped on the lowest price band wagon, and the quality showed it. Apple gets away with much higher margins because they never played that game. They never turned their box into a commodity, although that may change now.
I saw that, Jams. A bit twisted, but not all that far off. The media moguls think they will make money with this, but they are just pissing off their customer base.
When movie tickets are as, and in some cases more, expensive than the DVD, why would you go to the movie. The best alternative is to rent the DVD. They have priced themselves into this mess.