This isn’t about doing it “our” way or, if you prefer, Mike’s way. It’s about adaptation. Even you would agree that a business model that’s failing is wrong, which is where the *AAs are at and now seeking legislative protection against. Not just in the United States either.

Even you’ll admit that the business models that worked prior to the industrial revolution failed as that came in. Among them mercantilism and with no louder thud that the failure of the East India Company.

I don’t know what will come next.

In pricing perhaps we’re on the verge of returning to the bazaar. We need to keep in mind that fixed pricing is a new innovation, somewhat less than a century old. Before that people dickered. Outside of the West that’s still what most people do.

The point you’re still missing, and most do, is that “remix culture” is nothing new. You can find it all over symphonies. Pick one, listen and then find out about them. Filled with references or direct “steals” from folk music and the popular music of the day remixed into a symphony. Hymns used in churches were, and still are to an amazing degree, remixed popular music of the day. Of course these days things are licensed and churches pay a small amount to use the tunes but it’s still a remix.

You’re right when you say that sometimes we get distracted on the issue of the new business model. If the RIAA/MPAA don’t want to go along with the notion that their way doesn’t work anymore, well, that’s up to them.

At least till they bankroll legislators to run through bad legislation such as SOPA and PIPA. As we have no business forcing a business model on the unwilling they have no business telling the citizenry of the United States, Canada or France or the UK or anyone else to protect them from the inevitable. They aren’t “too big to fail”, merely rich enough to convince Congress, Parliament or whatever that they are. Hiding, of course, behind copyright, or at least their reading of it. Follow the money. In politics never a phrase was ever truer.

So, what’s to come? Dunno.

You are right that better service, better product and better, well, everything usually wins out. But not always. Look at what happened to most local grocers and local butchers who knew their customer base and, in the vast majority of cases, served it very well but were taken down by the economies of scale that supermarkets had.

But that’s also been discussed here. Beating the big guys at their own game. And avoiding becoming like them in the process. It doesn’t always happen. Just often enough it does to make it possible, and attainable. Linux took over the internet from the BSDs, Sun and Microsoft to the point where it’s ubiquitous now on DNS and other core routers and servers. And often the OS that guards MS servers from attack behind them. It’s everywhere but the desktop. So far. And no 2012 is not the year of the Linux desktop.

As for piracy, that people here oppose SOPA/PIPA and their copies in other nations doesn’t automatically mean we’re supportive of piracy. Free doesn’t always mean as in beer (see Linux above) but free as in freedom like Creative Commons licensing of, wait for it, a valid copyright. And again while it seems to make sense that piracy costs the copyright holder lost sales and,therefore profit, nearly every neutral study made disagrees. At worst is may be a perpetually lost sale in which case, well, it was never going to ne made. At best it’s a purchase delayed. Try before you buy, for example. It can also be valuable word of mouth.

Business models are as varied as the entities taking them on. The Business model for a small parish church is likely to be vastly different than Microsoft, for example. The parish would like to get to a small surplus rather than endless red ink while Microsoft wants to make every penny possible. Nothing evil or spectacularly good about either of them in that. Just what they do.

Like individuals they all want to take more in than the send out. The scale is different but, at the end of the day, that’s the only business model there is.

All that said, I’m sad to lose you. May 2012 bring you, joy, happiness and inner peace.

For my part I agree to stop trying to make everyone else to do it my way as soon as the “everyone else”, the **AAs in terms of this discussion stop trying to make me do it their way.(Then again, over 30 years in Alcoholics Anonymous has pounded it into my skull that my way often fails to I need to listen and learn from others. Even Anonymous Cowards!)

Take care.