Danny, in this case I wonder if she might not have some limited success. After all, as a museum they are probably used to working with small audiences, and there might not be as many other sources of this info vs. general news. Plus, I'm guessing that they aren't going to lose some other source of revenue in the process (such as advertising losses at NYTimes when it goes behind a paywall).
Like I said, I agree with Mike and you in principle, but wonder if a museum might be a special and somewhat different case.
Look at how the large consumer product companies, such as Proctor and Gamble, handle brands: They focus all their branding efforts on the product (show in this case) and nothing on the company (network).
Quite frankly, even with a gun pointed at my head, right now I couldn't tell you which brand of laundry soap was made by P&G. But I do know that we use Tide :)
A few years ago I was invited at the last moment to travel with our company CEO on the company jet. The pilots told us we could use our cell phones any time we wanted and could get a signal, even during take off and landing. They also didn't care about using laptops at any time. As others have said, it was never about safety.
That said, I too don't want to listen people around me yelling over the noise of the plane for several hours. Letting the market decide is unlikely to give us passengers an option as the airlines will go for the path that generates the greatest revenue. They've already proven (at least most carriers have) that they don't care about the passenger's experience.
I recently purchased an MP3 player from Sony's website (sonystyle.com) and had a series of stupid experiences with their customer service dept. I wrote a negative review on the product page to warn others to buy from alternate channels. But the review was never posted and a few days later I received an email from Sony customer service apologizing for the difficulty and giving me the tracking number of the package that had already been delivered 3 days earlier.
I suppose the only reviews that will get posted are ones with nothing negative in them. Another company that just doesn't get it. (Note: Sony announced several thousand layoffs today, and the general consensus is that it's nowhere near enough. Perhaps the marketplace will have the last word after all.)
From the BBC article:
"He says staff promised to secure the phone until he could retrieve it."
Wow, that puts a different spin on this don't you think? Mike, why didn't you mention this in your summary?
While I think $3M is a bit ridiculous considering it was the guy's fault for forgetting his phone, if he can show that the pictures were pulled off the phone AFTER the staff took possession of it, then I think he has a case for some damages. But I'm not sure how he could do that - seems possible that whoever found the phone might have copied them before turning it in.
Other public utilities such as water, gas, electricity are deemed to be essential to our lives, require large capital investments, and often only 1 provider is available to the average consumer. For those and other reasons these utilities are regulated.
While I am usually not a fan of letting the government make technology decisions, as internet access continues to become more essential to our basic lives and also becomes more of a commodity, at what point would it make sense to treat it as a public utility? Or is internet access somehow fundamentally different than the the other utilities and hence should not be regulated?
I don't disagree with Mike's points, but to take ejs' point a little further, nothing in Mike's argument makes the case for why an ISP would want to continue to invest in increasing their network capacity when there's no clear model to improve their revenue and/or profitability.
If the role of the ISP becomes similar to that of other public utilities, then they in effect become a commodity supplier. (Note: one definition of a commodity is anything that is primarily differentiated by its price.) As a marketing person, I can tell you that is NOT where any good marketing person wants to land up. You want to bundle other value-added services into packages that hopefully give you a unique and compelling offering in the market. Just offering a big fat pipe with no caps at a fixed monthly price is NOT appealing to the Comcasts of the world, even though I as a consumer would love to have just that.
I am not trying to defend the ISPs, just trying to point out how it looks from their point of view. I use Comcast as my ISP and would love to drop them given their recent decision to add caps, but the only other option available to my home is Qwest at a much slower (too slow) speed at nearly the same price. I use Vonage for both of our voice lines. I am probably not one of Comcast's more profitable customers.
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Re: It's isn't cognitive dissonance; I am quite sure it must be something else
Danny, in this case I wonder if she might not have some limited success. After all, as a museum they are probably used to working with small audiences, and there might not be as many other sources of this info vs. general news. Plus, I'm guessing that they aren't going to lose some other source of revenue in the process (such as advertising losses at NYTimes when it goes behind a paywall).
Like I said, I agree with Mike and you in principle, but wonder if a museum might be a special and somewhat different case.
A lesson from the consumer branding experts
Look at how the large consumer product companies, such as Proctor and Gamble, handle brands: They focus all their branding efforts on the product (show in this case) and nothing on the company (network).
Quite frankly, even with a gun pointed at my head, right now I couldn't tell you which brand of laundry soap was made by P&G. But I do know that we use Tide :)
A few years ago I was invited at the last moment to travel with our company CEO on the company jet. The pilots told us we could use our cell phones any time we wanted and could get a signal, even during take off and landing. They also didn't care about using laptops at any time. As others have said, it was never about safety.
That said, I too don't want to listen people around me yelling over the noise of the plane for several hours. Letting the market decide is unlikely to give us passengers an option as the airlines will go for the path that generates the greatest revenue. They've already proven (at least most carriers have) that they don't care about the passenger's experience.
It's not lmited to Amazon
I recently purchased an MP3 player from Sony's website (sonystyle.com) and had a series of stupid experiences with their customer service dept. I wrote a negative review on the product page to warn others to buy from alternate channels. But the review was never posted and a few days later I received an email from Sony customer service apologizing for the difficulty and giving me the tracking number of the package that had already been delivered 3 days earlier.
I suppose the only reviews that will get posted are ones with nothing negative in them. Another company that just doesn't get it. (Note: Sony announced several thousand layoffs today, and the general consensus is that it's nowhere near enough. Perhaps the marketplace will have the last word after all.)
From the BBC article:
"He says staff promised to secure the phone until he could retrieve it."
Wow, that puts a different spin on this don't you think? Mike, why didn't you mention this in your summary?
While I think $3M is a bit ridiculous considering it was the guy's fault for forgetting his phone, if he can show that the pictures were pulled off the phone AFTER the staff took possession of it, then I think he has a case for some damages. But I'm not sure how he could do that - seems possible that whoever found the phone might have copied them before turning it in.
At what point does Internet Access become a public utility?
Other public utilities such as water, gas, electricity are deemed to be essential to our lives, require large capital investments, and often only 1 provider is available to the average consumer. For those and other reasons these utilities are regulated.
While I am usually not a fan of letting the government make technology decisions, as internet access continues to become more essential to our basic lives and also becomes more of a commodity, at what point would it make sense to treat it as a public utility? Or is internet access somehow fundamentally different than the the other utilities and hence should not be regulated?
Michael's arguement only looks at it from the consumers's POV
I don't disagree with Mike's points, but to take ejs' point a little further, nothing in Mike's argument makes the case for why an ISP would want to continue to invest in increasing their network capacity when there's no clear model to improve their revenue and/or profitability.
If the role of the ISP becomes similar to that of other public utilities, then they in effect become a commodity supplier. (Note: one definition of a commodity is anything that is primarily differentiated by its price.) As a marketing person, I can tell you that is NOT where any good marketing person wants to land up. You want to bundle other value-added services into packages that hopefully give you a unique and compelling offering in the market. Just offering a big fat pipe with no caps at a fixed monthly price is NOT appealing to the Comcasts of the world, even though I as a consumer would love to have just that.
I am not trying to defend the ISPs, just trying to point out how it looks from their point of view. I use Comcast as my ISP and would love to drop them given their recent decision to add caps, but the only other option available to my home is Qwest at a much slower (too slow) speed at nearly the same price. I use Vonage for both of our voice lines. I am probably not one of Comcast's more profitable customers.