Hey, Sarbanes-Oxley made me do it!
Mokka mit Schlag » 802.11n is $0.99 Too Expensive — The Apple community is miffed by the fact that Apple is going to nick its customers for an apparently promised upgrade. The rationale for this is the miserable Sarbanes-Oxley law as we cite here. SO the blogger Elliote Harold comes to the rescue with a modest proposal. Personally as crummy and horrible as Sarbanes-Oxley can be I do not think it’s the reason Apple is doing it. If it was then the Harold proposal would happen.
Harold Proposal:
# Reduce the fee to $1.00. This is the generally recognized nominal price for indicating that you have to charge something, but don’t really want to. For instance, it was what juries award in damages when they want to indicate that the plaintiff is legally right, but is basically a putz and is wasting their time with a trivial suit they were largely responsible for in the first place.
# Make sure the updater is not copy protected, and look the other way as it is freely distributed on file sharing networks.
It is almost like when I leave a bad tip, just to get the point across
I was going to post this whole Sarbanes-Oxley angle myself when bloggers first picked up on the story. However, it didn’t really make sense so I researched the law to see if the bloggers were making any sense. They weren’t. There is no way in heck that compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley is the reason. It may be the scapegoat, but not the cause.
So the point of the article is “How dare Apple obey the law, because the law is flawed?”
I don’t know what people are complaining about, aren’t Apple users used to spending more for Apple products than they are worth. This is just another cash grab by a money hungry corporation.
#4 – Dunno if you’re right, but it’d be consistent with cynically blaming the law (SO) intended to force public companies into a bit more honesty.
Not endorsing SO as written. Still, a company doing what it wants in the service of greed, and then deflecting the blame to some law it wishes would go away… that does have a certain ring of truth about it.
Just another reason Jobs needs to be slapped.
It does not make any sense when compared to other products. For example: when the 5.5G ipod-video came out with game playing abilities apple offered an update to allow (unlock?) the original 5G ipod-video to also play games.
I don’t see any difference between the ipod and 802.11n situation. And I am sure everybody can think of similar situations.
Apart from the fanboys on either side of this aisle, office management 101 should tell y’all that Apple’s original price of $4.99 was closer to the actual cost of processing the paperwork required by Sorbanes-bullshit.
It’s been 20 years since the last time I ran a cost analysis for processing paperwork in a reasonably modern corporation — but, the primo difference is only that more is handled by physically smaller computers, nowadays. The number of steps required to record something like this certainly hasn’t diminished.
20 years ago, it cost the average corporation about $3.50 just to deposit a check. Not in charges; but, handling automated operations still requires button pushers, key punching and records. Especially for the idiots in Washington.
$1.99 is probably a net loss for Apple.
once the new airport extremes come out, it won’t be long till the firmware update shows up on bittorent sites like the piratebay. if you have to have it now, pay the $1.99, but most i assume will wait to download it off p2p sites
#8 – It isn’t just “Sarbanes-bullshit” raising costs. As companies go global and eat smaller companies each with its own systems in place, IT departments contend with huge headaches. Integrating everything without going all dictatorial and Motorola on highly dispersed operations centers dwarfs the problem in one market (the U.S.) of maintaining mandated process transparency.
Can’t blame one law when the real problem is much bigger. It isn’t intractable, though. For example, in SAP systems that may span dozens of countries and regions, SO compliance is really no more than a small reporting subset of change management. Whatever else Apple is doing, if they don’t have change management transparency built into their business intelligence by now, they have a lot more than SO to worry about. Their blaming SO here just doesn’t ring true to me.
what a pile of crap.
had apple not included the pre-N spec in its products, people would be bitching that their wireless products weren’t future-proof.
instead, apple plans ahead and has the audacity to charge 2 whole dollars for those who want to upgrade to a new capability not originally offered when they bought their hardware in the first place.
it boils down to this. pay the $2, or live with what you have. it’s not very complicated and not particularly worth all this discussion.
#8 –
“$1.99 is probably a net loss for Apple.”
For once, I have a feeling God is right…
I swear John I’ve read your little insights since way back in the ole IBM PC vs. Mac days. You’ve been pushing the same stuff since then. My god, man. You’ve actually made a living off of it. You remind me of how Trump and Rosie try to get a headline. You are amusing, but informative?, you stopped back around the IBM PC days. Well if this is how you want to be remembered, then no one’s stopping you I guess.
Yeah! How dare Apple treat their customers that way?
I’ve seen the errors of my ways, finally. What a fool I’ve been. I’m gonna trash my Macs and go with a company that respects their customers! Microsoft! Sign me up for that Windows Genuine Advantage, Bill!
It’s amazing how clear it all is now. That ECT really works!
Bzzzt!
#16 –
D’oh!!
You got me there, pedro… guess I better go dig ’em outta the Dumpster…