Comment by squarecat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by squarecat | Hacker News Reader

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Why? Long term viability -- a concept that many large successful companies seem to increasingly, and mistakenly, assume is assured by their sheer mass. This, despite plenty of recent examples to the contrary.

With no suggestion of altruism or the like, it is simply good business in most markets to invest in the satisfaction of your customers. Since they were brought up, Apple is an excellent HIGHLY PROFITABLE example of this correlation to the bottom line -- possibly the poster child of the foreseeable future. There are other good examples to be found, very likely in the form of far smaller enterprises in your own area.

Pleasing your new and incumbent user-base is certainly no guarantee of success, but can anyone produce data that supports the idea that it would be net loss in the long run, all things considered? I mean, if the definition of a business is intent to profit, doesn't it stand to reason that the longer you operate, the more profits you generate? (In the most generalized sense, not discounting the possibly complex specificities of a large operation nor the vagaries of human behavior and progress...)

> Why? Long term viability

Given how Android's been doing in terms of phone market share, I don't think Android OEMs need to be too terribly worried that failing to provide updates is seriously affecting their long-term viability. At least not for the moment. These kinds of complaints mostly only crop up among HN geeks like us; the bulk of the market at large doesn't know about, doesn't understand, or doesn't care about the issue.

On the other hand, paying for the development resources it would take to supply those kinds of updates would force an OEM to raise their prices. For reasons related to the above, It's reasonable to surmise that would be a suicidal move for any Android OEM. None of them are fueled by customers who love that company's product so much that they'd be willing to pay a premium price for it. On the contrary, the Android market is characterized by heavy price competition and razor-thin margins. It's like the PC market of 10 years ago: There's simply no mercy to spare for a company that blows any significant money on happy-warm-fuzzy customer support.

The average customer is MORE likely to act on warm-fuzzies. Human psychology dictates it and the marketplace demonstrates it. The stock market takes that behavior to the bank daily.

The purportedly high cost of OEM development would be mismanagement at best and is simply an informal fallacy at worst.

Your rebuttal supports my statements, as captured by this statement: "It's like the PC market of 10 years ago..." Pray tell, which players remain from that era and, of those, which are not on the brink of insolvency?

The average customer is more likely to act on what they perceive as warm fuzzies at the moment that they're making a purchasing decision. That may or may not correlate with what geeks such as ourselves feel warm and fuzzy about in the abstract.

Regardless, you misinterpret me. When I said warm fuzzies, I meant companies doing things just to be nice to customers, regardless of whether there's reason to believe it will draw immediate profit. These things can't be reasonably expected to affect revenues for companies that don't have very strong brands (say, Apple) simply because they're things that people generally aren't thinking about while they're in the store. People in general are barely aware of HTC as an actual entity, so they have a hard time having any sort of emotional reaction to it, positive or negative.

Pray tell, which players remain from that era and, of those, which are not on the brink of insolvency?

Dell, HP, Acer, Samsung, IBM/Lenovo, Toshiba. . . and they're all doing fine. I just double-checked on their rough financials, and all but HP had healthy increasing revenue and profit over the past year. HP's profits are down, but still deep in the black.

I stand corrected on the financial point.

And while we can agree that most people are largely brand agnostic in a number of tech-related purchases, sentiment still plays a role, even if it isn't as explicitly expressed in the way a typical Hacker News reader might.

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