Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

Someone named Brandon Pickering wrote a really good post on acting/pretending to be something you’re not and how some people do it all through life.

Well, some companies do it too.

The post actually has a part that’s very relevant to companies -

Unsurprisingly, parallels emerged between start-ups and presence. To summarize:

• Presence is a reflection of internal factors, such as the confluence of feelings that contribute to confidence, and competence.
• Companies that are corrupt internally may overcompensate on the surface to attempt to prove themselves reliable or trustworthy, just as a person who is thought-acting will frown to show that they are upset, or smile to show that they are happy.
• I realize now that often the best start-ups are the ones that have magnified the good aspects of corporate or personal culture – they have a competent, confident presence

That second point is so good let’s highlight it again -

Companies that are corrupt internally may overcompensate on the surface to attempt to prove themselves reliable or trustworthy, just as a person who is thought-acting will frown to show that they are upset, or smile to show that they are happy.

Unfortunately we are seeing this a lot with eReaders and eBooks. Let’s start with the companies that are not pretending to be self-sacrificing saints.

Apple and Amazon are getting derided for being honest

Apple and Amazon with their closed ecosystems are labeled as evil and not ‘good’ (whatever good means). But they’re just being honest.

How can we label them as evil when they are being upfront that they are a company and they want to make money?

They’re charging people upfront and being transparent to content creators and developers about what cut they get and they are still derided.

The popular opinion is that there’s another ‘open and ‘good’ option. The two obvious models that keep getting promoted as alternatives (to companies that are honest and upfront about making money) are -

1. Actual Non-Profits.
2. For-Profit companies that claim that they are good.

Let’s look at each in turn.

Actual Non-Profit Companies have limited resources

If you look at an actual not-for-profit company like the Internet Archive they just don’t have enough resources.

It takes a lot of money and manpower to create a complete eco-system – You can’t do it off of good thoughts alone.

1. Take eReaders – it took Amazon 3-4 years to design and develop the Kindle and then 2 years to validate the market. How would a not-for-profit company pay people and take the hit for $9.99 books and bear all the day-to-day costs?
2. Take the iPad – that’s years of development work and lots of investment in infrastructure and marketing. There aren’t any non-profits releasing genre creating devices to the best of my knowledge.

Reality is that creating any product or ecosystem takes money and the more money you have the better you can craft things and more polish and quality you can ensure. If we’re talking about revolutionizing books and democratizing Publishing we need money and resources.

It doesn’t hurt to have the incentive of making a ton of money if you’re successful. A not-for-profit will simply not have that motivation.

Since not-for-profit companies are ruled out we are left with the second option - A benevolent company that puts others before itself.  

It is impossible for a for-profit company to put others’ interests before itself

If a company keeps doing things that are harmful to itself to serve others it basically functions as a non-profit and runs into the ‘not enough money and resources’ problem. Basically the minute you stop focusing on profit as a #1 goal you’re no longer a company – you’re a charity or a hobby or something else.

If a company is a ‘for-profit’ it must focus on profit. It’s a very, very basic concept.

Since a company can’t be killing itself the best it can do is a 50-50 split i.e. the company helps itself and helps its customers. Here we run into a problem -

Isn’t that exactly what Apple and Amazon are doing?

Customers are willingly paying for their products and benefiting from them and know exactly what they pay. In return, Apple and Amazon are making profits. Our ‘evil’ companies have a win-win relationship with customers – How utterly shocking.

So our ‘evil’ companies are actually win-win. Customers who don’t like the terms can choose not to do business with them and best of all – everyone knows upfront what they’re paying (and that they’re paying something).

How is a ‘good’ company better than these ‘evil’ companies that are creating win-win situations?

It must mean the company that is ‘good’ is somehow doing better than the 50-50 split. This is where we run into problems – the better than 50-50 split is an illusion. These companies are just hiding or downplaying their 50% of the reward to make it seem better than 50-50.

eReader and eBook companies that are pretending to be good

Here’s a quick list -

1. B&N claiming an ‘open’ format when they have DRM on their ePub and also their Adobe DRM uses credit card information that causes it to not be compatible with Sony Readers.
2. eReaders that are late to market and are trying to make up for it by having an ‘open’ operating system on the eReader.
3. Anyone promoting an advertisement fueled model for books – To gain an advantage they’re ready to pollute users’ reading experiences.
4. Advertising and virtual goods supported game and app companies. They’ll make their way to books soon enough.
5. Companies that offer free products and then collect user information and sell it to advertisers.

These are all companies hiding how they really make money and hiding what customers really pay. Do note that some of them (such as B&N) are simply misleading customers – not exploiting them.

Why would a for-profit company want to pretend they don’t care about money?

Because they want to get a dual advantage -

• They want to get the goodwill that a charity or a not-for-profit gets. Towards this end they use an ‘open’ or ‘free’ strategy and pretend to be doing everything for free.
• They want to get profits (they are a company). They still focus primarily on making money – they just downplay the money-making part

The key here is that instead of creating and promoting a win-win situation these companies create the illusion of a ‘it’s good for the customer, we don’t care about ourselves’ scenario and lie to customers that customers get a lot of benefits with the company getting little or no benefit.

Every move the company makes to increase its profits is hidden as ‘we’re doing this for the customer’.

There’s nothing wrong with Profit. There might be something wrong with a goody two shoes company

There are lots of examples of people using charity and ‘good’ as a means to increase profit -

Perhaps the best example is Starbucks’ Save the World water product that gives 5 cents from every bottle to charity.

Guess what the company that Starbucks bought out used to give? 50 cents.

That’s a classic example of exploiting the ‘good’ angle.

We again come back to what young Mr. Pickering wrote -

Companies that are corrupt internally may overcompensate on the surface to attempt to prove themselves reliable or trustworthy

A company pretending to be ‘good’ is either compensating for actually being evil or its compensating for not having a great product.

The reality of competition

Often a company gives up a big lead to a competitor or just can’t create a product that’s good enough.

In that case, more often than not, it will choose the easy path of conjuring up orphans in Africa and use them to emotionally black-mail people and fool people into buying their product instead of the better product.

We are seeing a lot of that with eReaders and eBooks. Instead of better formatting and lower prices we have meaningless things like ‘open’ ePub and ‘open’ OS. These are then being treated as if they were actual advantages.

The best proof of what product is best is what customers buy and stick with.

1. We have all these ‘open’ app stores. Why then are the best apps in the ‘closed and evil’ iPhone App Store? Why does it have the most sales?
2. All the rival eBook stores are good and use ‘open’ ePub. Why then are the lowest prices and best range available in the Kindle Store? Why does it sell the most eBooks?

Competition is brutal and once a company gets left behind it has to fight back or die. It’s just sad to see so many companies resort to trickery.

Apple might be offering Publishers higher prices and passing off a multi-purpose device as an eReader – However, it’s doing everything in the open. What we have to be careful of are the companies that pretend to be as pure as the driven snow – these are just companies compensating for bad intentions and/or bad products.

eReaders and eBooks are going to see ‘free’, advertising supported books, ‘open’, and lots of other manipulations and trickery. It’d be good if at least one of these companies actually created a product and eco-system as good as Apple or Amazon and fought an honorable fight.

Filed under: Reality Tagged: | false altruism, good vs evil