alt Hacker NewsRe. The last paragraph, that's what confuses me the most about all of this. LG has virtually held a monopoly of the entire OLED TV market for the past ~15 years, selling (arguably) one of the TVs on the market and being the only thing I've recommended people buy in about as long. They could have done literally nothing but update the hardware every other year with a newer SoC, HDMI version, etc. and done just fine. Now, I don't think I could see myself buying or even recommending any LG products going forward.
There *has* to be some complex math involved. It's insane that there's more profit in duping your users to spy on them and sell their data/information, than there is just making and selling a great product.
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> It's insane that there's more profit in duping your users to spy on them and sell their data/information, than there is just making and selling a great product.
Seems pretty logical, no?
How do we sell more TVs? Be a cheaper and or better choice. If we're already doing well technically, sell customer data to discount the TV and appear more attractive.
If this is ethical / how much disclosure you'd need to give to customers so they can make this informed choice is a whole other discussion...
>It's insane that there's more profit in duping your users to spy on them and sell their data/information, than there is just making and selling a great product.
And it feels like an inflationary behavior: people need marketing because the product doesn't sell itself because it is neglected in favor of data collection and marketing that is needed because GOTO 1.
For a corporation there's always more money to be made, until it makes all the money in the world.
THe phrase is “leaving money on the table”
Pure naked greed, something to be celebrated in our Ferengi style capitalist system.
Their explanations are typically around markets being myopic and that low competition fucks things up even more. But we do make small decisions and they add up. I think many of the problems in the world today come from the accumulation of many small decisions, which is why they're hard to address. Obviously some people have more power than others, and more frequently have high power, but we should still look for our opportunities and not abdicate when and where we do have power. It is important for us to push back when we can. The top always wants to convince us that we have no power and we try to convince ourselves that's true because we believe that if we have power that makes us culpable, but I don't think that's true.
[0] my goto example is AWS. It's easy to find articles about how Azure or GCloud are "doing better" but AWS still has more total customers. But AWS is being "punished" for being at the top because it is just harder to grow percentage wise when you have a larger base amount (note, it isn't a zero sum game)