[amelius]

Companies are basically dictating what users "want": from social media to personalized ads.

The problem with regular users is: they don't care until it's too late.

Can we blame them? Not really, because life is too diverse to worry about every consumer product.

It's good, however, if there is a bunch of good guys who do the thinking for these users. Still, most users may not care, but eventually consumer advocacy groups will pick this up, and they will educate users.

[dvfjsdhgfv]

> The problem with regular users is: they don't care until it's too late.

But it shouldn't be that way, should it? At least it's not what I learned during my marketing lessons. You do market research, listen to your potential customers, discuss the results and proceed based on that.

In the mobile world you have an absurd situation that you remove an important component of the device, you release the device, everybody tells you it was a very stupid decision, you ignore everybody and still rake a ton of cash. Amazing.

[eudora]

I mostly see what you're saying here

The thing is, if these things resulted in increased profit over the medium term, they'd probably have happened already.

So yes there's user-hostile decisions made that put profit over users. Like ad tracking.

But there's other things that I think convince a user to purchase a product, and purchase the next product from the same company (loyalty maintained) that may not be in the user's best interests.

An example is a larger battery. My current theory is a manufacturer could easily have a 2 day battery and it wouldn't make for a terribly unwieldy phone.

But they don't, because customers are going to buy the phone next to it that is sleeker and weighs less.

I think customers are more often than not short sighted when making decisions like this. When they're in the store they think "but this one's so much nicer, and the battery probably lasts enough"

I think purchases are often made emotionally, not rationally, and a phone with 7 extra switches and more weight or thickness just seems clunky and less "high tech"