Things cost what people will pay for them. You use various techniques to figure out whatever the maximum price of a product or service will be, and you maximize that number.
Any and every tactic and strategy that isn't explicitly illegal is part of the toolkit put to this end. If it's illegal, but the fines cost less than the profit, it'll be used.
Things like principles and dignity and ethics are fluff for ad campaigns or players too small to matter.
Once past a certain threshold of size and age and complexity, publicly traded corporations enter an ecosystem utterly divorced from things like cost and value, they start playing with perceptions and mass psychology, with "what can we get away with" instead of "how can we be the best product in the market".
Consolidations and mergers and acquisitions make giant, soulless bureaucratic blobs out of companies that effectively lack any meaningful identity. What's the effective difference between Pepsi and Coke? Brother and HP? Samsung and Apple?
Any cable company or ISP? Any email provider?
The modern marketplace has been overcome by robber baron corporations and colluding nonhuman agents utilizing implicit rules and arbitraging the human rights differentials at every effective level. They're enabled by a sub-24 hour news cycle and the phenomena that allows outrageous things to happen with such incredible frequency that unless you truly bungle messaging and meme yourself into a Bud Light or Jaguar type situation, you can get away with anything.
The ecosystem of giant corporations that enable enterprise level products allow these companies to economically detach from the humans who actually use the products, while still dictating arbitrary prices and inflicting shitty service and product quality on consumers with no effective pricing dynamics.
You can't break into the printing "market" because they already have regulatory capture via IP and case law supporting their respective moats, and they have all the benefits of vertical integration and supply chains. You'll be acquired or litigated out of existence if you present any sort of meaningful threat to any aspect of these businesses.
So they jack the price of ink up to the maximum that they can get away with. Despite no increase in supply costs, no increase in value to the end user, the rate of increase will continue to rise until one or more enterprise customers get bothered enough to complain, and the contract will get renegotiated. Government contracts and deals with other massive bureaucracies are preferred, because the inertia means years of guaranteed income, often contractually inflated by contingencies like mandatory renegotiations and inflation hikes to the seller's advantage.
But hey, it's a global free market where anyone can sell amazing new inventions and get a commensurate return on the value they bring to the world!
Any and every tactic and strategy that isn't explicitly illegal is part of the toolkit put to this end. If it's illegal, but the fines cost less than the profit, it'll be used.
Things like principles and dignity and ethics are fluff for ad campaigns or players too small to matter.
Once past a certain threshold of size and age and complexity, publicly traded corporations enter an ecosystem utterly divorced from things like cost and value, they start playing with perceptions and mass psychology, with "what can we get away with" instead of "how can we be the best product in the market".
Consolidations and mergers and acquisitions make giant, soulless bureaucratic blobs out of companies that effectively lack any meaningful identity. What's the effective difference between Pepsi and Coke? Brother and HP? Samsung and Apple?
Any cable company or ISP? Any email provider?
The modern marketplace has been overcome by robber baron corporations and colluding nonhuman agents utilizing implicit rules and arbitraging the human rights differentials at every effective level. They're enabled by a sub-24 hour news cycle and the phenomena that allows outrageous things to happen with such incredible frequency that unless you truly bungle messaging and meme yourself into a Bud Light or Jaguar type situation, you can get away with anything.
The ecosystem of giant corporations that enable enterprise level products allow these companies to economically detach from the humans who actually use the products, while still dictating arbitrary prices and inflicting shitty service and product quality on consumers with no effective pricing dynamics.
You can't break into the printing "market" because they already have regulatory capture via IP and case law supporting their respective moats, and they have all the benefits of vertical integration and supply chains. You'll be acquired or litigated out of existence if you present any sort of meaningful threat to any aspect of these businesses.
So they jack the price of ink up to the maximum that they can get away with. Despite no increase in supply costs, no increase in value to the end user, the rate of increase will continue to rise until one or more enterprise customers get bothered enough to complain, and the contract will get renegotiated. Government contracts and deals with other massive bureaucracies are preferred, because the inertia means years of guaranteed income, often contractually inflated by contingencies like mandatory renegotiations and inflation hikes to the seller's advantage.
But hey, it's a global free market where anyone can sell amazing new inventions and get a commensurate return on the value they bring to the world!