Tag: sales

Digital technology firms, monopolies, and antitrust actions

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Today’s digital technology industries are characterized by intense degrees of corporate concentration.

Amazon revolutionized access to books and continues to grow its market share of both print books and eBook sales — approaching 50% of print sales and more than 90% of eBook sales.  It is also starting to dominate the sale of many other kinds of goods, and now vigorously seeks a dominant market share in sectors such as grocery retailing and pharmacies. Facebook, which owns 54% of the social media market, is responsible for a great deal of the Internet hate speech and fake news nightmares we face today. Google, which revolutionized the business of search, and now owns 76% percent of that market, seems to manipulate the search engine algorithm for its own commercial benefit.  Apple, which demonstrated that it was possible to design for ease of learning and ease of use and still achieve commercial success, now owns 66% of the tablet market and 22% of the mobile phone market, and seems to manipulate the policies of software distribution on its platforms for its own commercial benefit.

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Sales Support No More

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In a previous blog, I spoke about outsourcing, and the trade-offs for both companies and consumers, given the practise of many companies to outsource customer support globally. Here I shall speak about a related issue — the current tendency of most companies to skimp on or omit human customer support altogether. I shall illustrate this by describing three hours I spent yesterday and today trying to find a nearby store that had a USB-C to VGA converter for my Mac laptop.

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Should tech support be kept in-house?

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My cell phone is malfunctioning in many ways.  Top four problems: it no longer recognizes my fingerprint; I seem to have misplaced my AppleID, which together with the fingerprint recognition problem, makes it impossible to do many things; it does not sync properly with my laptop; and I have to retype my password many more times a day then is sensible.

So today I tried calling the main downtown Apple store, in the Toronto Eaton Centre, to make an appointment with a “genius”.  In the past, I have reached someone there, or perhaps in Toronto, or at least in Canada, who had some idea of the geography.  Today I first had to fill out a form on my cell phone, which wanted me to choose one its options with a canned support answer on the site.

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