Y'know what really grinds my gears? Cell phone contracts.
The intention of cell phone contracts, or any contract for that matter, is to cement an agreement between two parties. You tell me that you are going to deliver a good or service, and I tell you that I will reimburse you for said good or service. I have no problem with this - that's the arrangement that secured me student loans, put a nice car in my driveway, and will get me a mortgage when the time comes.
My problem lies squarely with cell providers utilizing contracts in the guise of cost control - by locking us into the seemingly now standard contract duration of two years, providers can afford to offer us with subsidized handsets.
That's it. You get a cheaper phone.
Your monthly fees on this two year contract are still outrageous when you consider the highway robbery that is texting and mobile data. So don't text or use mobile data - after all, a phone is for making voice calls, right? (More thoughts on that in a future post.)
Does your two year contract afford you any upgrade options for your handset when the battery inevitably starts draining about a year in, or when you drop your phone into a river of hot molten magma? Good luck with that.
What about when the next product cycle hits and you'd gladly pay to "upgrade" your phone (as in the iPhone 3GS upgrade fiasco)? Sorry valued and locked in customer, your reward for being a loyal serf is paying full retail price to help subsidize new suckers/customers.
My thoughts on early termination fees (ETFs) are mixed. Yes, the idea of preventing consumers from breaking a contract by fining them sucks - but at the same time, that's the contract you signed. I'm definitely not a lawyer, so I have no clue how else you'd enforce the contract, other than to sue each user who breached the contract on a case-by-case basis. ETFs are not entirely prohibitive, either - paying a couple hundred dollars to get out of your contract is not as bad as having to pay off the remaining duration of your contract, which could amount into the thousands. I've ETFed my last two contracts - with AT&T when their customer service promised me something they failed to deliver, and T-Mobile when it was time to come back to AT&T for the in-network benefits with my friends and family.
As I'm not a lawyer, I am also not an economist. I believe, though, that the time for phone subsidies in exchange for long-term, prohibitive contracts has passed.
For one, unlocked OEM cell phones are cheaper than ever. The bottom-of-the-line Nokia I'm currently rocking set me back $40 and didn't require me genuflecting at the contract altar to get a subsidized price. Providers should offer cheap, functional, sturdy phones at reasonable prices without the need to recoup expenses for the latest pocket-sized supercomputer phone.
For two, it is increasingly disingenuous to lock customers into a provider. I understand that business plans are based on estimating the number of customers a provider will have at any particular time, and contracts help to make this estimate easier to make. Y'know what'll bring customers in the door, though? Not treating them like criminals or indentured servants. Open up to the free market and let customers make educated and fluid decisions on which provider is right for them.
The cost to providers in dropping contracts is obvious: the power in the relationship gets shifted to the consumer. If provider X fails to deliver, provides shoddy customer service, sub-par network coverage, or isn't providing the best handsets, a customer could leave provider X without first paying provider X for X's ineptitude. As it stands, providers have little incentive to innovate or add value for pre-existing customers, and as long as companies can keep tempting consumers into renewing contracts for a few dollars discount on a handset, any incentive will continue to be minimal.
The benefit to providers in dropping contracts is, in fact, this incentive to innovate, which I think would benefit the industry as a whole. When providers really have to fight for customers, they'll be more focused on expeditious network upgrades, adding new and exciting features (all of the cool things being done in Asia, anyone?), and cracking down on sub-par customer service. All of these things would then benefit the consumer, who would naturally gravitate to the truly quality provider. Give your customers incentive to stay with your service, and the need for binding contracts disappears.
In my opinion, this is what the FCC should be looking into, and not some silly iPhone witch hunt. Forget "exclusivity agreements between carriers and handset manufacturers" and start thinking about "exclusivity agreements between carriers and consumers."
Friday, September 4, 2009
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Why Can't We Be Friends?
As mentioned earlier, cable TV is not an option at this juncture for Casa de Luddite. Through a generous familial donation, the wife and I have been donated a DTV converter. DTV, in theory, sounds awesome. Who wouldn't want crystal-clear, over-the-air transmissions of all the channels that really matter? I've determined, however, that the digital cable transition was just a thinly-veiled ploy to sell new antennas and amplifiers, since my undoubtedly antique rabbit ears are ill-equipped to suckle on this "new" digital signal. What I get in the meantime is, well, digital - either I receive a channel, or I don't - which is in stark contrast to pre-DTV, when I could at least look forward to listening to a station without necessarily having the clearest picture. We fired up the converter sometime back around Wimbledon - ever try to watch a tennis match where 8 of every 10 seconds is frozen? Good luck. One of my guilty pleasures, "America's Got Talent," is on channel 2 in the UHF band, and that's a recipe for broken reception, if it is received at all. DTV, why don't you love me like I love you? Perusing Newegg for a replacement antenna was an exercise in frustration - may as well pick an affordable one at random and hope for the best. UHF has been around in the States since the 50s...you'd think there would have been quantum advances in antenna technology since then, right? Ah well, you get what you pay for.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
The Great Gmail Outage of Aught-Nine
In case you were hiking the Appalachian trail today, Gmail had a meeting with the fail whale. Again. The internets were astir, and it doesn't take a quick perusal of trending topics on Twitter to know how incredibly valuable this email service is to folks and how inexplicably heart-wrenching it is when it's down.
For one, I love Gmail, and can certainly understand people's frustrations with the downtime. Gmail has been my go-to email service since I received my invite five years ago (give or take - does that make me old?). I read some responses to the service interruption today that were downright livid - aggravation leveled at a payment-free service (It is certainly not totally free - there's opportunity cost involved, like the storage and cataloging of your personal correspondence, for instance.) that in my recent memory has been nothing but rock solid. Why get so worked up about an interruption that amounted to a few hours?
This downtime and subsequent grousing speaks to the ubiquity of being connected in today's culture and how quickly our expectations have shifted. It wasn't all that long ago that we didn't have email period, and now email is virtually inescapable. There's email on our desktop computers, email on the web, email on our cell phones, inboxes for our social networks, direct Twitter messages. We are never not connected, and kids (Ha! I'm 28. I feel like a grumpy old man.) growing up right now can't conceive of a world where they are not persistently connected. Many of us now couldn't not be persistently connected, even if we wanted to be - work requires us to carry Blackberries and cell phones and pagers so that we are constantly contactable. We carry laptops on vacation.
Think about that for a second. What an odd sensation to never be able to shut down.
For one, I love Gmail, and can certainly understand people's frustrations with the downtime. Gmail has been my go-to email service since I received my invite five years ago (give or take - does that make me old?). I read some responses to the service interruption today that were downright livid - aggravation leveled at a payment-free service (It is certainly not totally free - there's opportunity cost involved, like the storage and cataloging of your personal correspondence, for instance.) that in my recent memory has been nothing but rock solid. Why get so worked up about an interruption that amounted to a few hours?
This downtime and subsequent grousing speaks to the ubiquity of being connected in today's culture and how quickly our expectations have shifted. It wasn't all that long ago that we didn't have email period, and now email is virtually inescapable. There's email on our desktop computers, email on the web, email on our cell phones, inboxes for our social networks, direct Twitter messages. We are never not connected, and kids (Ha! I'm 28. I feel like a grumpy old man.) growing up right now can't conceive of a world where they are not persistently connected. Many of us now couldn't not be persistently connected, even if we wanted to be - work requires us to carry Blackberries and cell phones and pagers so that we are constantly contactable. We carry laptops on vacation.
Think about that for a second. What an odd sensation to never be able to shut down.
Hello World
A Luddite in simple contemporary terms is one who opposes technology. A gross oversimplification of the designation, to be sure, but one that will serve the purposes of what I intend to write about in this blog.
Does an antonym for "Luddite" exist in our lexicon? "Technophile," perhaps? Simply, "geek"? Whatever meaningful opposite you can conjure up in your head to oppose the opposition of technology, that would have and may still describe me.
There's an episode of The Simpsons that is a roundabout analogy to how I felt about technology. Homer decides to buy a gun, and then proceeds to use it to do everything in his life - I distinctly remember him shooting open a beer and trying to change the TV channel by shooting at the television. I am Homer Simpson, and technology is my gun. If there was a way to make my life more tech savvy, I sought it out. I've got my work calendar synced to my Google Calendar synced to my iPhone over-the-air. I have my multi-protocol IM client that broadcasts what's playing on iTunes. I've got my Google Reader and Tumblr RSS feeds nourishing my Twitter account. If there wasn't an app for it on the iPhone, I didn't want it - how could people live without mobile internet, email, GPS locating, gaming, and camera, all in one package? In fact, I had been through five or six mobile phones in the span of half a year looking for just the right one. With any luck, I was lightning-fast enough signing up for the Google Wave beta that I may look forward to an invite at the end of the month. On my desktop computer I have a visceral need for the fastest processor, the beefiest GPU, more and better RAM, a bigger monitor, better sound - Dell.com gets visited once a week to fiddle with configurations, and there are multiple saved wishlists on Newegg.com for my ultimate build-a-computer. Every month as a bachelor, I could easily justify nicking this or that gadget or gizmo. My work computer was an illicit testing ground for every little piece of new and innovative software the interwebs had to recommend.
Tech lust has made me do some silly things. Case in point - although I was not enamored of the first generation iPhone (what a silly concept - that'll *never* catch on), count me as one of the poor suckers who waited in line for 5 hours for the iPhone 3G (*not* 3GS - thanks for not early upgrading me, AT&T) release, just to drive away from the store with my new, unworking and unactivated, phone. You would have thought the Braves had won the World Series or Arsenal did the treble for the joyous exclamations when that hunk of metal and plastic finally synced with iTunes and activated.
"Sounds like this fella likes his tech," I hope you're thinking. "What's all this talk of being a Luddite?", I hope you're asking.
See up above, where I mentioned being a bachelor? I'm not one, anymore. In marrying the love of my life, I have moved back to my adopted hometown, and in the process, gave up my pleasantly lucrative research job. When this decision was made, our economy was much more robust, and job prospects did not worry me. Consider me currently worried.
The wife and I have been duly diligent in pinching pennies and tightening belts and utilizing all of those other adult euphemisms for budget control, and in the process I have made some hard but worthwhile decisions. First to go was cable TV - in fact, it was never here at the house to begin with, but we definitely can't afford it now. World of Warcraft showed me the sad gnome face when the cancellation button was clicked. I have upgraded my iPhone 3G to a $40 Nokia 1208 - don't cry for me, because that joker has a frickin' flashlight on it! Slowly, but surely, my life is changing into one where technology is not only unattainable, but almost avoided. The strange thing for me is that I have embraced this lifestyle. I have looked for ways to simplify, and inevitably those simplifications have come down to eliminating expensive technology for a good, sometimes older-fashioned, solution.
Make no mistake, we are far from starving, and I am extraordinarily thankful for all of the many luxuries we still have. Going to bed every night in an air-conditioned home and not being concerned where my next meal is coming from are not to be taken for granted. This is not me whining about giving up all my cool toys.
What this is, then, is a rumination. I have had a lot of time to think in the last few months about technology and the role it has played, plays, and will play in my life. I apologize for the rambling and preemptively apologize for the continued ramblings. Here goes nothing.
Does an antonym for "Luddite" exist in our lexicon? "Technophile," perhaps? Simply, "geek"? Whatever meaningful opposite you can conjure up in your head to oppose the opposition of technology, that would have and may still describe me.
There's an episode of The Simpsons that is a roundabout analogy to how I felt about technology. Homer decides to buy a gun, and then proceeds to use it to do everything in his life - I distinctly remember him shooting open a beer and trying to change the TV channel by shooting at the television. I am Homer Simpson, and technology is my gun. If there was a way to make my life more tech savvy, I sought it out. I've got my work calendar synced to my Google Calendar synced to my iPhone over-the-air. I have my multi-protocol IM client that broadcasts what's playing on iTunes. I've got my Google Reader and Tumblr RSS feeds nourishing my Twitter account. If there wasn't an app for it on the iPhone, I didn't want it - how could people live without mobile internet, email, GPS locating, gaming, and camera, all in one package? In fact, I had been through five or six mobile phones in the span of half a year looking for just the right one. With any luck, I was lightning-fast enough signing up for the Google Wave beta that I may look forward to an invite at the end of the month. On my desktop computer I have a visceral need for the fastest processor, the beefiest GPU, more and better RAM, a bigger monitor, better sound - Dell.com gets visited once a week to fiddle with configurations, and there are multiple saved wishlists on Newegg.com for my ultimate build-a-computer. Every month as a bachelor, I could easily justify nicking this or that gadget or gizmo. My work computer was an illicit testing ground for every little piece of new and innovative software the interwebs had to recommend.
Tech lust has made me do some silly things. Case in point - although I was not enamored of the first generation iPhone (what a silly concept - that'll *never* catch on), count me as one of the poor suckers who waited in line for 5 hours for the iPhone 3G (*not* 3GS - thanks for not early upgrading me, AT&T) release, just to drive away from the store with my new, unworking and unactivated, phone. You would have thought the Braves had won the World Series or Arsenal did the treble for the joyous exclamations when that hunk of metal and plastic finally synced with iTunes and activated.
"Sounds like this fella likes his tech," I hope you're thinking. "What's all this talk of being a Luddite?", I hope you're asking.
See up above, where I mentioned being a bachelor? I'm not one, anymore. In marrying the love of my life, I have moved back to my adopted hometown, and in the process, gave up my pleasantly lucrative research job. When this decision was made, our economy was much more robust, and job prospects did not worry me. Consider me currently worried.
The wife and I have been duly diligent in pinching pennies and tightening belts and utilizing all of those other adult euphemisms for budget control, and in the process I have made some hard but worthwhile decisions. First to go was cable TV - in fact, it was never here at the house to begin with, but we definitely can't afford it now. World of Warcraft showed me the sad gnome face when the cancellation button was clicked. I have upgraded my iPhone 3G to a $40 Nokia 1208 - don't cry for me, because that joker has a frickin' flashlight on it! Slowly, but surely, my life is changing into one where technology is not only unattainable, but almost avoided. The strange thing for me is that I have embraced this lifestyle. I have looked for ways to simplify, and inevitably those simplifications have come down to eliminating expensive technology for a good, sometimes older-fashioned, solution.
Make no mistake, we are far from starving, and I am extraordinarily thankful for all of the many luxuries we still have. Going to bed every night in an air-conditioned home and not being concerned where my next meal is coming from are not to be taken for granted. This is not me whining about giving up all my cool toys.
What this is, then, is a rumination. I have had a lot of time to think in the last few months about technology and the role it has played, plays, and will play in my life. I apologize for the rambling and preemptively apologize for the continued ramblings. Here goes nothing.
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