David Pogue had two related pieces in the New York Times recently. One was a review of something called the Vulkano, which should be the answer to everyone's prayer: a TiVo that also allows you to watch your at-home TV programming on the road, and on your mobile device, and on your computer.
This sounds great, but according to Pogue, it's not. The device, as he describes it, is pretty flawed: it's technologically limited, the menus are overcomplicated, it makes you do all kinds of elaborate quasi-programming stuff. And it's $380. Not cheap, especially for something that doesn't work very well.
Pogue (who is never at a loss for words) also spun a second piece out of this: a little essay wondering why companies sell sub-standard products. What do they gain, after all? He posits three possible corporate mindsets:
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“We'll just fix it later.”
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“We don't know what we're doing.”
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“We're doomed anyway, so we may as well market the thing the way it is."
He leaves out the one that I tend to favor, however:
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“We're completely amoral and will make money any way we can, even with a substandard product.”
I still remember reading Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, with its depictions of the horrible pre-union pre-regulation Chicago meat industry, and I can still visualize the scene in which one of the workers falls into a vat and gets rendered into lard. (It was a long time before I ate corned beef again, thank you very much.)
Most flawed products these days aren't quite Soylent Green, but the profit motive is still as lively as ever.
This is where we consumers get to exert market pressure on these cheese-eating money-grubbing vile cynical companies, kids:
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Do your research.
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Read the reviews.
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Whenever possible, go to the store and look at / fondle / play with the technology you're interested in.
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Don't buy a piece of rubbish, just because it's new and makes a lot of promises.
In a word: don't eat the corned beef unless you're pretty sure that it's good corned beef.
To quote another famous consumer advocate: you have nothing to lose but your chains.
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