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Comment by blinkingled | Hacker News Reader

I personally don't have a big problem with carriers loading apps on the phones as long as they don't interfere with what I do, but it is mind boggling how idiotic the "rest" of the industry is in not identifying this opportunity. It took the PC industry only a decade or so to start offering crapware free computers - first at $50 premium and now free as an option. May be the carriers can do better.

The carriers should really stay out of the software side - less spending for them, clean experience for users and let the manufacturers do what they know best. If the OHA members just stood up for themselves and convince the carriers, I can easily see it happening.

In a way T-Mo has taken the right direction for G2, hopefully each manufacturer offers at least one clean experience phone per carrier.

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> It took the PC industry only a decade or so to start offering crapware free computers - first at $50 premium and now free as an option.

What PC manufacturers do this? I can't think of a single mainstream one, though maybe I'm just uninformed.

The reason small PC manufacturers can do this is because there's simply more of them, since the barriers to entry are much smaller than setting up a wireless network.

Sony did with fresh start.

Interesting. From the looks of a little searching, it was unusually for them.

Crapware isn't an expense, it's a source of revenue. Think of it like the ads on Google's result page. Just another conduit for commerce the carrier and manufacturer use improve profitability.

Deciding to kill a source of revenue, whether it's more appealing to the consumer or not, becomes harder to justify when that source of revenue is paying off creditors and funding new development.

A gigantic source of high margin incremental revenue. If Dell generates one signup to $ANTIVIRUS_MAKER_FOO, that can be worth about as much as the sale of the machine to Dell's bottom line. (For these and other scary insights, I suggest attending shareware conferences.)

Think of it like the ads on Google's result page

The ads on Google's result page bring in about 75% of their revenue. If it's like that for telecos and crapware, they no wonder they don't want to lose it.

When I referred to spending I was thinking more about carriers taking responsibility of writing the custom apps, testing and distributing the OS updates etc. If they let the manufacturer do that (like Apple) they would have less stuff to bother about.

As far as crapware goes - yeah it might be ad like revenue but I can't imagine it's a major part of revenue for carriers - they can mitigate it by charging little more for the clean experience models.

Sometimes all of the profit is where you'd least expect it. $10 per month for VZNavigator? How much of that is really a cost to Verizon?