Negroponte, OLPC, AAAS, obese electronics

[Alex Hewitt]

On Tue, 2008-02-19 at 15:20 -0500, Ben Scott wrote:
> On Feb 19, 2008 2:43 PM, Neil Joseph Schelly <neil at jenandneil.com> wrote:
> > These arguments never go anywhere.
> 
>   It takes two to tango.  ;-)  If you don't like the lame, quibbling
> arguments, don't participate in them.  Nobody's making you hit
> "Reply".  Not even Microsoft.  ;-)
> 
> > They don't make it more complex, expensive, or any of that.
> 
>   They do indeed make it more complex.  How much varies from phone to
> phone.  To spin it with PHB buzzwords, TCO keeps increasing, even
> though purchase price remains the same.  A frequent complaint I hear
> from the 30 or so mobile phone users at work is that their new phone
> is over-complicated.  They'd rather a simpler device that worked
> better.  But those don't sell as well to the general population.
> Marketing works.  I suppose you could say people deserve what they
> get, but it's annoying for those of us who can see beyond the sales
> display.
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Of course one thing worse than overly complicated phones is having the
carrier deliberately cripple the phone unless you buy extra services
from them. That seems to be a specialty of my carrier, Verizon, but I'm
sure others do similar things so that the phone for example can only
send pictures to another of the carrier's phones or the bluetooth
support doesn't allow you to access the storage in the phone. Cute
tricks that make a complicated product more complicated.

-Alex