‘The customer is always right’
p2pnet news view | P2P:- The media associations are shooting themselves in the foot.
Period.
So says The Angry Offender in a comment post to Kiddie pirates threaten Hollywood.
He goes on >>>
The bottom line is that ANYTHING that a business does publicly which is anti-consumer seriously damages that business. Best Buy’s Geek Squad has this GS Agent guy running around all kinds of Internet message boards defending the Geeks while telling people how STUPID they are for complaining about them, all under the alias ‘Agent Orange.’ He responded to one Internet article about how Geek Squad’s prices were quite excessive (and yes, kids, charging half a C-note extra because you’re installing a ’suite’ like Office instead of a ’single title’ like QuickBooks is NUTS) with this commentary:
‘I am an Agent of the precinct and laugh at you people who call for service and scoff at the charges. If your so savvy, why don’t you do a google search, find a forum and hook up your wireless network yourself!!! You boomers think you have all the answers but can’t follow a ‘recipe’ for anything but hamburger helper. By the way. How come you will pay your Lexus mechanic $1100 for a tune up, but us coming into your home and saving you a headache for $200 is absurd. I have spent $30,000 on my MCSE and countless hours honing my craft. I can’t vouch for the 18 year old newbie’s out there but what were you doing when you were 18?’
See http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/37291/service_review_the_geek_squad.html for full context.
If this is how any representative of a business treats its customers, or POTENTIAL customers, IT KILLS OFF BUSINESS. The RIAA and MPAA lawsuits against consumers for sharing music, the RIAA wanting radio stations to pay a nasty chunk of money per song play that they can’t afford instead of the current licensing model (when THE RADIO STATIONS’ COOPERATION MAKES THE ‘HOT BANDS’ KNOWN IN THE FIRST PLACE), and the pressure from the **AA international wings to shut down The Pirate Bay. these are all OUTRAGEOUS and EVEN THE ‘AVERAGE JOE’ GETS IT.
I was listening in on a local show on talk radio that I won’t name, and the host has always talked about how he doesn’t think people should download music because it hurts artists and it’s illegal and wrong. but that seems to be changing, because the slice of the show I caught today was on this very topic, specifically the radio station licensing changes the RIAA wants to force upon radio stations. Everyone was very unhappy with what they heard about this, and it was essentially unanimous that such a thing would result in a terrestrial radio gravitation towards cheaper and more varied independent music, or formats such as talk radio.
My grandfather had a nice big HDTV hooked to a hi-def digital DVR, and a connection apparently went wrong, causing a ‘connected HDMI device does not support HDCP’ message to cover up the Big Game that they were watching. It wouldn’t have stopped a pirate from copying the Big Game, but it certainly stopped the legitimate purchaser of the TV services from receiving the service being paid for, all in the name of ‘copy protection.’ The damage from consumer-unfriendly behaviors like these on modern equipment (that never was a problem on VCRs and CDs, by the way) will far outweigh the blocking of a few amateur content pirates that follow poorly written directions from two years ago on how to copy content from an HDMI output.
Microsoft, by putting a higher priority on content protection technologies than customer-helpful features (tossing out, for example, Windows Future Storage, or WinFS, a very highly anticipated and potentially even revolutionary feature when Vista’s beta was called Longhorn), has shot themselves in the foot. Vista murders performance benchmarks for every single application thrown at it, and introduces user-unfriendly ‘features’ such as the nagging bastard that is User Account Control (which can be disabled, only to cause other things to break) and ‘driver signature enforcement’ and encrypting video data that passes over the PCI Express bus to a digital-output-enabled video card. not much more needs to be said.
Apple’s starting to slow down in their quest to run their business model off a cliff, but they’re still making some of the mistakes Microsoft has made. They simply can’t afford to make ALL of them just to keep some pissy exec at BMI or Sony happy because of their minority market share that relies on highly dedicated customers who they simply can’t afford to anger.
When these fools all start to remember core principles of business such as ‘give the customer what they want and you will flourish,’ this pending train wreck may be avoided, but mark my words. in ten years, Microsoft, Apple, Best Buy, and every record and movie label under the media associations’ umbrellas may well be gone completely from the markets they have dominated for the previous ten if they keep going the way they’re going.
Being sued for taking a clip of a movie on a crappy-quality camera phone and being forced to use only ‘approved’ hardware that restricts your ability to use your own computer you paid for. these are all fatal errors on the part of the companies engaging in these behaviors, and the real problem for these companies and associations is that customers are ‘getting it’ without requiring the help of angry p2pnet readers to make it understandable. I can tell you from experience with many diverse classes and backgrounds of people I have talked to who ask me computer questions from time to time that the biggest question I am asked after ‘what can I do to get rid of viruses and spyware and all that junk?’ is invariably ‘what can I use to download music?’ I tell them the whole spill every time about how to do it, as well as some hefty warnings about what’s legal and what’s not because they all believe that it’s OK to download music from the Internet for free, and I let them decide what they want to do with that information after I’ve informed them fully. Downloading music is here to stay. The momentum behind the media distribution revolution is too huge for the **AA to keep ignoring. If they don’t adapt, they *will* die.
They can sue their customers all day long, but eventually, P2P and disgruntled customers leaving Britney behind for non-RIAA indie groups will break them so hard that they won’t even be able to fund the lawyers in the first place.
The customer is always right.
Even if you think they’re wrong.
Because the customer is the only reason your ass is in business in the first place, and when you forget that, the customer reminds you in pretty painful ways who’s the *real* boss.
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November 14th, 2007 at 5:54 pm
It is in every business book:
If you forgot that the “Customer Is Always Rght” you go out of business.
The parasites are going out of business!
Good!
November 14th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
This guy should be paid two hundred dollars for writing this.
OH CRAP, I FORGOT TO CLEAR THE NAME BLANK!