tomyam80: Anyway, I beg to differ. Companies will almost never do anything which is against their interest in favour of the consumers & Govt will also never step in unless there is a gross & huge uproar by a massive amt of consumers that petition to have them enact into legislation.
Well.. like I said, the biggest and most successful companies (economically) now are, undeniably, companies that don't address problems informed users might think is gamebreaking. They don't push the hardware prices down, they don't focus on putting the most powerful or efficient hardware into the product to get the best experience. Instead they design packages focused on delivering a better total "experience", with more.. er... holistic presentation. So they will argue, with some.. weight, that concerns about privacy, avoiding inconveniences for the users, making actual advances with the tools offered, and so on, doesn't actually pay off.
This can be things like better battery life, or better screens, more durable hardware, component design that breaks down less, is more heat efficient, laptops with cooling elements that actually work, etc. That's not the focus of reviews and also not the focus of what draws customer interest. Apple is utterly impressive (in a manner of speaking) when it comes to this. Some of us were huge fans of consistent UI response and 100% predictable battery life with the PPC based power-macs, for example. But the intel based shells that are cheaper to make, and still maintain a brand presence - in spite of not offering the same features the PPC-based product did - are pushed very hard. And it makes Apple more money than the PPC-based "fringe" products.
The same thing happens on privacy and encryption with cloud based services very often. People buy convenience over a more complex and better designed product, and it is also cheaper to make. So that product dominates the market. Which then leads us back to how it doesn't actually pay off for a company to pick a more decent product in their lineup. On the other side, you have "corporate" solutions that tend to be extremely expensive but often not actually that good. Because whoever bought it value for example "flexibility" or "support" over time over a solution that nerds think makes sense.
You always imagine that there's this tug of war between legislation and company greed, of course. That even though people buy the cheapest stuff, or the prettiest logo, and so on (or even the more expensive product with the better reputation, regardless of the actual features) - you would still have some common ground when saying: but for all the products, we would like them to have some reasonable minimal standard.
Privacy could be a very obvious area where this should be an extremely easy discussion. That while the prettiest logo or the most popular net-based service would be picked, that everyone would still demand that it adheres to some sort of standard.
But it's not the case. What happens is that sales favor short-changing the technical solutions. And that people are very often convinced that legislation is a hindrance, often to a higher degree than what the actual marketing departments in the greediest corporation thinks. I've been involved in a few cases like that, where we've convinced companies to pre-empt negative reactions to problems that users simply don't care about, for example. So we've gotten a focus on security over obscurity, and highlighted problems with how formalisation of data makes it more vulnerable to hacks. And then basically tricked people into thinking that they should invest more effort into security than they would have done normally.
I mean, this kind of thing makes you very cynical, but the truth is that it's extremely hard to entice both customers and companies to actually see the foundation of the problem as something other than a pure marketing problem. And I don't know how to solve that. I have friends who will convince themselves of some sort of Kal Popper-ish positivism, where any solution invariably is improved over time, incrementally via falsification and replacement, regardless of the stops in between.
But what you really get when you can successfully argue that customers want convenience over quality, is that you don't have to actually improve your product in technical ways to compete. So you remove it from that "balance" equation outright. Instead you simply focus on a large enough group's subjective approval and pick that solution. Like.. evolution. The prettiest and most enticing mate in an isolated context wins, and there's nothing objective about the aspects that improve, or whether they improve overall over time.
So sometimes you then actually get both expensive and bad technical solutions. That still have customers become enthusiastic enough to buy the product.
I obviously don't think that's the way things should be. But it's unfortunately something that does happen. Even when many people want to be critical and check a lot of information before making a purchase.
I know this is very cynical. But what can you say, when you sit in a company and have better approval ratings for a product with simple and easy to present marketing, than the one with more complex and critical documentation focusing on the limitations and strengths of the product? You would have to be an incredible idealist to then say that you take on yourself, at cost to your company, a social responsibility to rear your customers, where legislation doesn't even encourage you to do it.
Basically, that's why in many ways you get a very confrontational attitude about this. That you want to catch a company doing something outrageous, that then results in legislation and more restrictions. But that process is counter-productive, because it results in legalese catch-all defenses and immunity from lawsuit rather than improvement of the product. Because we don't have power, as consumers, to enact laws that upend companies when they are large enough. That's just not how politics work: you don't want to sabotage companies to extinction, almost regardless of how bad their conduct is. "Retroactive" legislation, so to speak, is something that doesn't happen, for example.
And the key to solving that imbalance is of course informed consumers and consumer choice. So you get the weight of profits geared towards what actually is a technically solid solution. But I'm honestly not sure if it's possible to do it. From own experience, I've had a company director decide to close a department of the company because the product wasn't received with the expected fawning, for example. It was a good product, but it drew users who were critical and who made expensive demands. So they just disbanded the entire thing and focused on a simpler product that was easier to sell.
