Money for nothing - III

Continued from part 1 and part 2

The goal of the (admittedly long) list of examples in the previous parts is to set the stage for the following argument:

1. Buyers have little control over how they pay for goods and services.
2. Sellers are interested in getting buyers to pay at the earliest which facilitates buyers to minimize the total expense incurred on that buyer, from sales, through the product/service delivery and its support. Buyers, as a consequence rarely have the opportunity to try things before valuing them.
3. Due to this long tradition of sellers dictating the value of goods, people have lost the skill to value goods objectively.
4. Due to the buyer's decreasing control on determining the value of goods, they play a lesser role in demanding what they need from a given product or service.
5. As a consequence, sellers have turned to investing more in finding ways to make buyers pay as much as possible as early as possible, so they can in turn spend the least possible amount on the goods.
6. In the end, buyers suffer, since they dont get what they want. Companies suffer, since the customer has less and less faith in the value of the offerings from companies, and it becomes increasingly harder to convince the customer to buy new technology without resorting to negative strategies.

Many people have reacted to this argument that all this is obvious, but that is how it is, and what can we do about it? I agree that we cannot fix this overnight, but there are small steps we can take towards addressing this problem, at least specifically in the software domain, which has some unique advantages.

That is next up.