Over at CoCo rik talks about a company called Vesco. They market a product to ISPs that “blocks bandwidth drains such as Skype, P2P messaging, streaming media and instant messaging”. Apparently ISPs hate these uses: they use a lot of their bandwidth and Skype robs them of the potential of selling users expensive VoIP solutions. They even use the expression “raiding the ISPs business model”.
This is one of Geeklawyer’s pet peeves. Companies get what they think is a great business idea but it depends on certain assumptions about how the recipients of the goods or services will use them. They spend loads of money on the idea and then, woefully, discover that people have though of other better cheaper ways of utilising this idea.
They then start banging on about the “theft of our intellectual property”, stealing of services, dishonest customers or as here robbing business models. This is completely absurd. Free marketeers such as Geeklawyer say that no-one owes any company a profit just because they’ve invested resources. They’ve failed to adequately analyse the business model and its risks, and then lost out. Poor and economically inefficient companies go to the wall companies with superior products and services win. Tough. Whinging that its not fair is pathetic. Grow up, you’re customers aren’t thieves: it’s just that you’re inept.
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