As a foreign body in the USA, when I first came to live here I couldn’t help notice some recurring themes. A lot of places sell a lot of really cheap stuff — cheap food, cheap clothes, cheap cars, cheap houses. And when you buy something, it tends to be physically large. I’m not saying you always get a lot out of it at the end, because sometimes that largeness is filled with air, soy protein, high fructose corn syrup and styrofoam. But always large. And consistently crap. Out of date food on the supermarket shelves. New cars that look like the height of 80’s fashion and with the durability of a wet paper bag. T-shirts that turn to rags on their first wash and dye all the rest of your clothes pink in the process. Enormous houses that have less durability than my parents’ garden shed back in London.
Cheap. Crap. And lots of it. The driving force of the world’s largest economy. Just look at Wal-Mart. “Always low prices”, my arse! “Cheap, crap and lots of it! Come on in and load up in Sam’s place!”. Just look at the prices, never mind the real cost.
Which brings us to our old friend, the Internet. In many ways this is the Wal-Mart of data communications. It’s hideously inefficient at real-time communications. Every penis extending spam packet needs to be delivered at the same speed as my webcam with the oldies back home. You end up using a lot more of it dealing with waste and breakage than if you’d bought something decent in the first place. It’s truly awful in terms of efficiency at managing jitter and routing: look at how Skype sends your data stream over multiple simultaneous routes in the hope of something getting there in a timely fashion. We end up building endless patches to deal with the lack of hooks into the analog world and things like identity infrastructures. Every spammer and DDoS fiend is anonymous because nobody thought of creating a governance mechanism to deal with abuse of an IP address.
But it’s really simple. And thus has a very low cost to turn standards into hardware and software that universally interoperates. Despite the technical horror of the whole edifice, it does deliver real-time video and voice in a reasonably reliable fashion. And it’s economic efficiency has led it to fill every data delivery nook and cranny around.
It’s easy to get on a high horse and say that we should have a “better” open network, with channel reservations, jitter and latency guarantees, etc. You may also think that shoppers at Wal-Mart would be “better off” not buying supersize packs of Doritos Cardiac Arrest Flavor and unstimulating plastic kiddies toys. Yet the economic reality is that Wal-Mart is the ultimate shopping monster and the Internet is the ultimate data monster. Cheap. Crap. And lots of it. It’s the American way.
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Martin, Hilarious!
Long Live The American Way!
John
I find it interesting, that you don't mention Snap-On Tools, for instance. They produce the highest quality hand tools IN THE WORLD, and the most expensive, as well. And they're all US-made, in Wisconsin. They are coveted world-wide for thier outstanding quality, strength, and reliability - and the "cheap crap" come from Japan, China, Korea...
Yes, this is the world's supermarket. You can get products here from more places in the world than just about anywhere else. But we don't make the "cheap crap", and that's why we're wealthy, and they aren't.
But on any given day, vastly more people buy stuff at someplace OTHER than Walmart, than they do at WalMart. WalMart isn't America. It's just a tiny spec of it. Come to think of it, if we stuck England in America, it would be a tiny part of it, too. Broaden your horizons, you've missed the forest, for the tree you're standing behind.
Mark
Cheap, crap and lots of it isn't just the American Way. It's the American Way, and it's wonderful! It's total democratisation of consumption. Don't just aspire - ingest! It can easily be re-cast as "affordable, functional and plentiful". For the Internet, it's the democratic amplifier for communications for the common man. It's not bad - it's great!
My Dad used to be an aircraft mechanic before he retired. I remember him saying how wonderful Snap-On tools were, but you couldn't afford them and your workmates stole them when you did buy them. Quality of a commercial product is an extrinsic feature - fitness for the purpose. Otherwise, it's industrial art if it relies on its intrinsic excellence.
The irony is that British manufacturing tried to go down the expensive, fabulous and unobtainable route for a long time (the Rolls Royce and Concorde syndrome), and it was a miserable failure. Wal-Mart and the Internet are dominant *because* they are cheap, crap and in big supply.
Lots of love to my American hosts (and hey, my daughter's a Yankee too you know...)
Martin
What an awful analogy. Comparing a delivery system to a department store. The doors, aisles, checkout registers, and customer service of WalMart might be a better analogy.
The worst part of this analogy is that the implication is that the goods found at WalMart are crappy, just like the goods on the Internet, which is so wrong I don't even know where to start, and I know is not your point.
If you're going to make an analogy, then compare apples to apples. Analogies are supposed to help people understand your point, not further confuse them.
Posted by: at November 25, 2003 06:15 PM