[occultist_throw]

The issue here is the following:

Crowfunding implies that you don't have enough money to start making and holding inventory for $something. And $something is usually small, under some hundred dollar device that the markets haven't figured out yet.

Like, the recent RISC cpu board - its new, novel, and really neat. But to make them costs a bit per board. $25 each, which in lots of 1000, is up to $25k capital. But the design and idea is awesome, and lots of others agree. So people put money in, and take a bit of risk, to see that this is made, and they get it, and prove there is a market to continue.

When big companies do this, they have plenty of capital and ability. The risk they're taking is that if the "market bears it". And using crowdfunding platforms, they also shunt the risk almost completely off since those platforms offer pretty much nothing in terms of guarantees.

Big companies using crowdfunding also short-circuits the idea for these - which is that big companies ignore many market segments because of their size. In the short and long of it, they are bad actors.

Read my previous comment history and tslug's comment about how capitalism reduces an infinite amount of dimensions of ethics, value, and liability down to a single scalar : money.

Of course bad actors (read: big companies) are going to hack and use it ways that aren't intended. They have no ethics(legally required, except for benefit corps), only governmental fines which are some percent of the damages they cause.

[icodestuff]

It seems like a ridiculously inefficient system you're promoting. Why should companies be forced to risk spending millions developing a product using only a best-guess system as to actual demand for a potential product, when they could have people put their money where their mouth is? Sure, they don't have to use crowdfunding platforms, but if they're not set up to do pre-orders for things themselves, they might judge the platform fees worth it.

The ethics aren't what you say they are either. First, while if a startup crowd funds a product and fails, you're SOL. When a billion dollar company crowd funds a product, even if the platform makes no guarantees, if it fails do deliver then you have recourse against the company. Second, Why should only small players be able to address previously unaddressed markets? Isn't that one of the complaints about big companies, that they ignore small markets? And now that they've got the ability to actually test out a market - and serve it in the process! - that's a bad thing too?