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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

I'd imagine such a venture would be mostly marketing. No real innovation, which HN will point out, but lots of hype and your friend who doesn't know tech will buy one and tell you about the great new innovations and how they're disrupting the old monopoly.

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Right, that's what I mean (I had understood the term disruption incorrectly). Is there a reason this is not a lucrative venture, to produce something clean and user-friendly that captures the goodwill of customers and force competitors to play nice?

I'd imagine a business would be over the moon with the scenario you're describing.

My guess is mainly that it's not sexy, it's a fairly niche thing. VC will look at it and say "what's your moat" until someone bites and decides that you do have a moat, at which point you'll be like Transfer Wise (now called Wise), basically an old product pretending to be innovative.

I bet it could be done, just needs someone to take a punt.

One could imagine a load of such niches. Come in, act like you're doing something new, get investment, capture market.

If that were more profitable that's how the market would already be?

I guess most people just believe the story about the chips being used to make sure there's enough ink. If they're even aware of the chips.

I think anyone who has ever tried to get any process optimizations pushed through in a large company, knows that the idea of "the market will automatically do whatever is most profitable" is mostly an ideologically convenient pipedream.

Absolutely. But I think that in the specific case -- if every firm in an entire market is abusing customers -- it implies that the abuse is profitable, and the market success shows consumers are abuse-tolerant. Really it's showing something about the demand side of the market.

To talk about ideological pipedreams the "perfect information" consumer is the other side of it.

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