alt Hacker NewsIt appears that taking advantage of human imperfections and irrationality are taking up more and more of companies' strategies and time.
You've got folks thinking constantly about advertising, pricing strategies, dark patterns, network effects that prevent or discourage churn, etc., in ways that tend to exploit flaws in the consumer's decisioning process or gaps in their knowledge, to the consumer's disadvantage.
It feels rare to see an actual new valuable product or improvement.
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Having to pay for your bags and meals are actually good for consumers and overall environment.
If passengers are forced to pack lightly because they have to pay extra fees is actually a win-win-win for everyone. Plus it is less discriminatory because my airfare is not subsidizing someone else abuse of the system.
Same goes with food. I want the option to not pay for the shitty airline food.
I have no love lost for airlines but they operate in a commoditized industry where customers sort tickets by price. All of the fat in the industry has been squeezed out and they have to claw for $20 here and there on a sale.
When you have A) a customer who isn't looking for a bargain, and B) a seller who cares about their reputation – then doing business is a pleasure for both parties and very smooth.
If you're the seller, then it's easy to filter out customers who don't fit into category A, with pricing. For the customer it's harder to filter out sellers who don't fit into category B, but generally you won't find them if you're looking for a bargain.
Spot on. Surfline gave us a bunch of new features over the past year but you have to pay more for them. Gone are the days of delighting your customers — gotta take every penny you can from each market segment.
You can find people back in 1880 (probably before, but that is as old as I've seen something) saying much the same thing. Yet we have had a lot of innovation since then.
You got economy or business class, you really don’t have much choice
Looking at the S&P500 about 30-40% of us equities value is based on selling customers data back to them or advertising on it, and establishing network effect stuff like developer ecosystems or marketplaces (Amazon) where a majority of the value comes from the outside ecosystem. I'm counting some of nvidia in that as the profitability others get of selling back transformed free data is a big part of enabling their margin.
I think the biggest change in general corporate management in my lifetime was the deprioritizing of the concept of goodwill. I’m not naive, businesses have always prioritized profit. However, there used to be this idea that pure profit maximization ruined your brand and reputation. You didn’t want to be known as the asshole company that nickel and dimes everyone or has draconian policies that make people hate dealing with you. Now the corporate mindset is seemingly that if anyone leaves any interaction with you with any positive feelings, you didn’t squeeze enough money out of them.