Corporations are good at getting you to spend money. They employ entire firms of people whose sole function is to discover myriadly multipluous methods of removing you from your hard-earned scratch, even if it’s against your better judgment and intent. No foul here, it’s just what they do–no point in decrying the egg for being egg-shaped, after all.
One of the methods by which these nefarious shitbags accomplish their pecuniary sleight of hand is to increase the perception of a product or service’s value without actually delivering anything of significant utility. At Large Specialty Retail Chain, or Greedy Assholes Making Employees Sixty-Third Overall Priority, they trained us to increase the profit perceived value of a sale by aggressively pitching an assload of things that the customer usually didn’t want or need, most often in the form of reservations, subscriptions, and accessories. You’ve seen that tactic before, no doubt. (And would you like a nice hot apple pie with that? Sure! Does it come with a first aid kit so I can repair the damage to my tongue from the scrumptious molten aluminum apple-cinnamon filling?) Mmmm, skin grafts.
Corporations that offer ubiquitous subscription-based services, such as cable and cell phones, find themselves in a particularly tough spot when it comes to increasing revenue, profit, stock prices and, ultimately, the value of executives’ options. Once they’ve saturated a market with subscribers (consider how many people you know who don’t have a cell phone), what comes next? Aside from raising their rates, a decidedly unpopular tactic if one ever pulled on mukluks and ran naked around the boardroom, the only alternative they’ve got is to offer more crap you don’t want.
Every day we hear about 3G. New 3G this, HSPDA/UMTS/W-CDMA that, and up until recently my most pressing question was “what in the sweet holy concrete Christmas fruitcake hell do all those letters mean?!” Now that I know what they mean, I’ll share them with you and spread joy and peppermint bunny poop o’er the land.
Ready? Brace yourself.
To the average cell phone user, they mean exactly dick. To the CEO of Very Large Mobility, Inc., they mean a few things. An obscenely large yacht. A chateau in southern Switzerland. Early retirement. An embarrassingly younger girlfriend with enormous hooters.
Hmm.
Oh yes. Anyway. 3G, which is a term that indicates the third generation of cell phone technology, translates to faster and broader data rates, along with increased network capacity and lower battery life. If you plan on using your phone to watch TV or surf the web while you drive Cody and Tyler to their no-score everybody-wins tee ball game, that’s a Good Thing. If, like most of us, you use your phone only for calls and texts, 3G sounds about as appealing as a catshit soufflé, and even less useful.
I don’t care about 3G data services, or HSDPA speeds of between 300k to 3Mbps. Each of the 3G GSM phones that I’ve used have drained the life from a battery faster than Jay Leno could harsh the collective buzz at a Pride Parade. I’m not going to videoconference or download songs to my phone through any provider’s expensive-as-civet-poo proprietary music service, and apparently neither are most people, which explains the slow buy-in from the majority of phone users to a system that they simply do not need.
But again, this is what they do, these duplicitous asswipes. They spend billions licensing the spectrum and developing the infrastructure for these networks, and then they spend even more inventing the demand. They roll the cost into overpriced data plans so that Mr. iPhone Q. Dingleberry can surf the web and tap-tap tappity-tap his greasy, fingerprint-smudged screen until the aftershocks of Steve Jobs’ sanctimonious orgasm can be felt by every angora herder in Ankara. Hey, send me a picture message, would you, Mr. iPhone? What? No? Just as I thought.
3G and its various acronymed appellations can only be as useful as the content and functionality allow, delivered at a price that the average Jim Average is comfortable with. So while we lag behind countries like Japan and South Korea in terms of interface deployment, we do pretty well at not slobbering the corporate knob to toe the line at the adoption of gratuitous and questionably useful technology.
I’ll take it.
