Benjamin Mako Hill made a great post on the Free Software Foundation blog today about what he calls Anti-Features, those incredibly annoying technological limits that companies spend time and money to put on their products and make you pay to take off, like the ability to download raw data from a camera rather than a compressed jpeg.
I noticed a similar trend this summer while Prius shopping. Every Prius in the world is basically built the same way, so that it can be outfitted with all the bells and whistles of the top model. Given the low cost of electronics, I’m sure it would be cheaper for them to make every car the same, but they’ve done enough market research to know that people like options, and are willing to pay $2k more for $10 worth of wires that make their phone talk to their car. Many people base their self-identity on their car, and wouldn’t buy a car unless they were sure their model was more expensive than someone else’s (other people value thrift, and thus require that their model is less expensive). Despite the fact that it would be cheaper and more efficient to give everyone all the bells and whistles, the market responds better to fabricated class stratification.
Don’t even get me started on how much less it would have cost Microsoft to build a DRM-free Zune, and how much better it would be selling currently!
