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Comment by mbarbar | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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