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Comment by thefool | Hacker News Reader

Because it feels like your being cheated when you are sold something that the person that is selling it to you broke on purpose.

It doesn't really matter if the practice actually lets more people use a product, it just feels dirty.

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On the flip side - whenever I see stuff which is so easily modded to its full version I usually imagine an engineer inside a large corporation grinning because he knows some kid somewhere will figure this out and get an early christmas present. Case in point - the amd 6950 radeons that can be flashed to radeon 6970's, earlier nvidia cards that could be softmodded to quadros etc . I mean the product differentiation could be actually a lot more involved and sometimes it just feels like the product was designed to be unlocked by the hackers and tinkerers.

I see a lot of Web 2.0 applications these days that have their own pieces of foam. It's really all the same code on the backend and theoretically it wouldn't cost them anymore to enable all features completely. They purposely disable features or put their own pieces of "digital" foam in between plans in order to provide different price points for users.

The difference is that people generally expect to own the utilitarian physical goods that they pay for. Since information can't be owned in the same sense, it's understood that buying it is going to take the form of some sort of licensing arrangement with more arbitrary conditions.

In reality, the economics of the utilitarian physical goods business may sometimes resemble more those of the information business, but it's up to manufacturers to justify that to their customers.

Most of us would like to believe that the companies from which we purchase products have our best interests at heart when we buy their products. Apple, for instance, has benefited enormously from this brand perception. We'd like to believe that they built the best product at that price point which they could afford to, given their commitment to supporting excellent R&D, QA, etc. Intentionally crippling a product, particularly a physical product, means that resources were expended to produce an intentionally suboptimal product. What if auto manufacturers could intentionally reduce the fuel efficiency of their vehicles, say by manipulating the ignition control software, in order to differentiate their vehicles? Or produce were intentionally held in storage for a few extra days, at additional expense, in order to create a lower price category? What if life saving drugs where partially denatured by heating them to artificially reduce their effectiveness to provide lower price points for people who couldn't afford the premium medication? It feels wrong, perhaps because it is wrong. Companies should at least be up front about it, rather than concealing the practice, and acting huffy when they are called on it.

It is not only about feeling personally cheated, it is about observing such a glaring inefficiency of the economy. Sennheiser expended a lot of effort to create a perfectly good product, and then our economy stimulates them to waste a part of this effort by crippling the product just to create... a kind of pay-what-you can scheme.

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