Most Corporations are Idiots from Planck's Constant

A tip of the turban Hat Tip to Becky over at Just a Girl in short shorts talking about whatever for alerting us to Natalie Portman's naked, adorable butt in Wes Anderson's short film The Hotel Chevalier. Shortly after posting some YouTube videos of the flick, 20^th Century Fox had them pulled off for copyright reasons.

Becky was quite right in her assessment of those who run such corporations:

A little note to Twentieth Century Fox:

Welcome to the asshole club. I saw on the site statistics that you had lingered here for about twenty minutes and I assume you detected that I gave your little flick a nice review.

Then you decided to become typical corporate douchebags and run to YouTube and have the flick removed from that site because of copyright invasion. How profoundly ignorant.

I even advised my readers that the free version at itunes had better audio than the YouTube embedded version.

But, wouldn't it really better serve your interest of promoting The Darjeeling Limited, to have the prologue clip out there and as available as possible.

You are being Neanderthals just like I mentioned yesterday about the RIAA. You will lose in the end playing this game, and in this particular case are actually losing at this moment in the loss of sales of tickets.

Of course you can download it for free at iTunes so what's the big fuss anyway?

I remember when Disney and the other studios fought to keep video recorders off the market because they were afraid the new technology would kill movie sales. It turned out that VHS tapes saved the movie industry. Becky is right. Modern American corporations are all idiots that have no clue about how to treat new technology. Instead of hiring a thousand geeks to teach them how to sell music in the new world, the RIAA hired a thousand lawyers to sue people who would never have bought that much music in the first place; if anything, the Internet probably saved the music business altogether.

My readers know that I will never directly link an article to the New York Times. Why bother when two weeks later they put up a 404 - Not Found Error. Don't you think they could make more money by simply allowing advertising on an archived story? I wouldn't be surprised that they get hundreds of thousands of hits a day to a Not Found Page which generates ZERO income for them.

There was a time when Verizon 411 services said that for 35 cents they would dial the number for you. Do you know they made almost no money from that? What idiot would pay them 35 cents to automatically dial a number for you? If instead they said 1 penny they would have made millions. In my company it was forbidden for my employees to use that service. The average person in America gets paid about 7/10^ths of a penny a second. It takes about 3 seconds to dial a number and so it costs the average company about 2 cents or more for someone to dial a phone number. I would have permitted my employees to use the service if the phone company had only been reasonable. But they were not.

The recent iPhone price reduction scandal only shows that even marketing mavens like Steve Jobs really have no clue about how to treat the American consumer. But Apple Computer has been treating its customers with contempt for quite a while. I still don't get it why they want me to pay for a charger for the iPod when it should be part of the original sale.

While I'm on a rant, how come printers don't come with a cable anymore? Why do I have to buy it separately?

If it weren't a monopoly AT&T would go out of business because it has no clue how to compete in the modern world. Oh wait, it did go out of business and had to be bought up by one of the remaining Baby Bells. The only reason that the big corporations in America are still in business is momentum. Eventually they will be gone, replaced by lighter, smarter, non-idiot corporations run by Japanese.