The power to fix broken markets
Published: 01 Sep 2008 17:12 BST
It's not hard to spot when a free market is being artificially constrained: it's one where locksmiths and lawyers do better than users.
Check out the razor aisle at the supermarket, where overpriced slivers of steel and plastic sit behind glass. Take a look at recreational drugs; entire countries destabilised through horticulture. Sniff around the Cologne Regional Court, where the proper designation of printer ink has has inspired a long court case.
In all these cases and many more, unfettered intercourse between buyers and sellers is controlled for reasons of stability. The trouble is, this conscious support makes it very difficult for the market to evolve — any movement away from the status quo is seen as harmful by those who maintain it, even when common sense or evidence suggests otherwise.
Low-cost PCs are a particularly good example, where the nanotech-thin margins on hardware are offset by vendors bundling ever-larger amounts of bloated trialware paid for by software makers. Nobody likes it, it doesn't work well, and its major effect is keeping independent PC support companies in lucrative business stripping it out. But you can't get rid of it at source, say the hardware vendors, because it would be uncompetitive for them to sell their kit at sensible margins.
Well, no. Fortunately in this case, the burgeoning netbook is showing other ways to make money other than by annoying your customers. There's less sign of that happening with printers, where the ink costs more than blood but less than gold — and consequently, true innovation here is rare.
Without innovation and evolution, any market will fail. It is up to us as users and consumers to help them in this, and not to accept the annoyance and expense of being treated as nothing more than biddable cash machines. The act of not buying the bad stuff — of choosing an alternative not for immediate convenience but for long-term benefit — has many more ramifications and far more power than we let ourselves believe.
You can't be ripped off without your consent: withhold it and demand better. Enough red ink for them will make our outlook far less black.
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