Your inconvenience powers high-tech profits

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how the U.S. government gets the highest of high technology when it suits it, but somehow still can’t figure out how to procure accurate and reliable voting machines to further the cause of democracy. Clearly, there are no technological hurdles here, just skewed priorities.

But the government isn’t alone in neglecting the interests of its constituents — so do many high-tech companies. They don’t bother to hide it, either. It’s as plain as their stock ticker symbol.

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The most obvious example is printers and printer ink. The consumer printing industry has gone to school on the razor manufacturers and adopted their time-honored strategy from top to bottom: Make the printers cheap, the refills horribly expensive, and profit handsomely.

Some printers, for example, take 6mL cartridges that cost $15. That seems like a deal until you realize that the actual ink in the cartridges costs around $120 for 5,000mL. Manufacturers also intentionally make printers of such poor quality that they break down prematurely, prompting the consumer to buy another “cheap” printer and continue the cycle.

This is not news — especially if you use a printer from time to time and suddenly find you have to take out a second mortgage to refill the color cartridge. Meanwhile, I’ve had a circa 2000 HP LaserJet that’s been showing a “Low Toner” message for the past decade, yet still prints fine.

It’s convenient for these companies to work this way. And it’s much healthier for their profits as long as people just shrug their shoulders and continue to pay more per milliliter for printer ink than human blood.

Another example: text messaging. That one’s been beaten to death for years, with people pointing out that it costs less, bit for bit, to communicate with the Hubble telescope than to send a text message to your friend. It’s unconscionable, but it persists.

And don’t get me started on mobile data usage. In a short time, we’ve gone from multiple companies offering unlimited data plans to Verizon charging $20 per gigabyte per month. If you tip over that limit, you get charged another $20, and so on and so forth. These are usurious prices, but where else can you turn? Planning on taking that sleek, new LTE iPad that’s tied to Verizon over to AT&T for a better deal? Nope, you’re effectively chained to Verizon’s yoke unless you want to sell your iPad and buy a new one. It’s locked-in cellphones all over again, just more expensive.

But there’s more to the mobile data nonsense than ridiculous fees — they’re also lax in metering when it suits them. Many mobile carriers offer fixed capacity plans that limit you to, say, 3GB per month, then throttle the throughput once you’ve reached that limit. This means they’re actively monitoring each device’s utilization and triggering extensive QoS rules to reign in the bandwidth available to each and every device on an ongoing basis. You hit that cap, and kapow, you’re running at the speed of a 56kbps modem. But somehow, they can’t tell you how much data you’re using in a timely fashion.

In fact, many carriers show a monstrous lag in utilization reporting. For instance, I was in a hotel not long ago that had horrendous Wi-Fi. Luckily it cost “only” $9.99 per day; at best, I was able to eke out 384kbps, falling to 56kbps at times. Instead, I tried out Verizon’s LTE service in that area. Netflix performed admirably, streaming high-quality video to my iPad with nary a hitch. Websites loaded quickly and smoothly, and the latency was refreshingly low.

After mucking about for an hour using only LTE, I logged into the cellular data usage panel on the iPad to see how much data I’d gone through. The stats showed that I hadn’t used any data at all in that hour. Intrigued, I watched yet another episode of “Justified” on the iPad, a few YouTube videos, and did some surfing and email. After another hour I checked again — and it showed the same usage.

Three or four hours later, I saw the usage rise. My heavy network utilization was actively costing me money, yet Verizon couldn’t be bothered to tell me how much I’d used. Imagine a gas gauge on a car that only registered full or empty, with nothing in between. Plus, Verizon makes it as annoying as possible to check that wildly inaccurate status, requiring that you enter your email address and password every single time, without an option to save them.

That might be maddeningly inconvenient for the consumer, but it’s quite convenient for the vendor, and barring mass revolt or an investigation by the FTC, it will continue to be convenient for them. Ma Bell was broken up for a reason, as you may recall.

This situation has and will continue to hamper innovation and adoption of new and better technologies. Not only are we given this bread and shown this circus, we’re being overcharged for the privilege.

This story, “Your inconvenience powers high-tech profits,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Paul Venezia’s The Deep End blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.