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I've been thinking that a natural way to split up many large corporations that are anti-consumer would be to require: 1. Hardware manufacturers be separated fr
by spaethnl 7y ago
I've been thinking that a natural way to split up many large corporations that are anti-consumer would be to require:
1. Hardware manufacturers be separated from software manufactures
2. All hardware sold must have available appropriate documentation to write software for it.
3. Hardware and software be purchasable piecemeal, even when also available as a pre-configured bundle.
For example, for Google to sell a Google Home device they would:
1. Have to have a company, Google Home:Hardware, that produces the physical device and it's documentation
2. Have a company, Google Home:Software, that implements the software for that device, and perhaps bundles it.
3. These companies can collaborate, e.g., through support contracts, but any documentation made available to Google Home:Software must also be made available to purchasers of the physical device, separate from Google Home:Software.
Advantages of this approach:
1. This supports the "Right To Repair" movement.
2. Production of hardware has a very high cost-of-entry relative to software, making it prohibitively expensive for new entrants to compete. This allows smaller entrepreneurs to build software on existing hardware designs, bringing new features to consumers.
3. New competition will help to naturally break the anti-consumer monopolies and oligopolies currently existing, because they will have to compete with features that they currently refuse to implement, fix issues they currently refuse to acknowledge.
4. As a re-iteration of 3, would provide more consumer choice. Where as right now an individual may like the hardware features of one television set, they may dislike the software features if it (privacy invasion and phoning home?). Consumers could mix and match.
Although I've focused on tech with Google, this is applicable to many industries: smart phones, TVs, smart home devices, farming equipment, vehicles, robotic vacuums...
- chillacy 7y agoThat's sort of how it works in the automotive industry: one company makes the parts, one company assembles the car, one company sells the car and anyone can provide service. The only downside is that there's a lot of overhead (imagine if a software project you worked on needed this amount of formality every time you talked to a UI designer or database engineer).