With love to IIPM Arindam!
Dear Arindam:
It hurts. I can understand. All along you have been trying to build and establish your business and along comes a blog that makes you look like a villain out to bamboozle unwary students. They miss your latest (and perhaps the greatest, if I exclude your book which makes me grate to read it) contribution to showing the path for the "Great Indian Dream" of free speech and punishing those who provide us with defective products or misleading information.
You have added yourself to a long list of martyrs who have shown that lowering of "transaction costs" by technology can take even the most prepared by surprise. Obviously you haven't planned and managed enough. But then that is too much to ask of you! In a market, when you are selling a defective product, one can be given to "manage the truth", and if consumers cannot pass on product information to each other, then obviously it pays off. Who has the resource to inform other consumers that here is a defective product and beware of it? Bah! Too much transaction cost involved. You can tell one, probably a hundred but that is it, and public memory is short, we all know!
But then you forgot a little element of internet technology, the ubiquitous link! The linking ensures that the "transaction cost" of sharing information is dramatically lowered, and moreover, it stays out there for eternity. So a consumer doesn't have to shout from the rooftops to spread word of a bad product, he can just link it! A little lesson of geometric progression will let you imagine its power of extent. So we had till yesterday, either the government or the media only to rely on for even the iota of reliable information that it passes on. Until the transaction cost of "creating, possessing and passing on information" got dramatically lowered! The "transaction costs" of free speech have just hit the bottom! And the results are telling! The law will grapple with the technicalities while the technology will leave the law behind.
For all you producers of defective products or misleading information, do not make the mistake of underestimating the power of "word of mouth" or "link of blog." IIPM is not the final and neither the greatest "martyr"!The power of a democratic press in now in your hands, and blogs will lead the revolution!
Rok Sako To Rok Lo
It hurts. I can understand. All along you have been trying to build and establish your business and along comes a blog that makes you look like a villain out to bamboozle unwary students. They miss your latest (and perhaps the greatest, if I exclude your book which makes me grate to read it) contribution to showing the path for the "Great Indian Dream" of free speech and punishing those who provide us with defective products or misleading information.
You have added yourself to a long list of martyrs who have shown that lowering of "transaction costs" by technology can take even the most prepared by surprise. Obviously you haven't planned and managed enough. But then that is too much to ask of you! In a market, when you are selling a defective product, one can be given to "manage the truth", and if consumers cannot pass on product information to each other, then obviously it pays off. Who has the resource to inform other consumers that here is a defective product and beware of it? Bah! Too much transaction cost involved. You can tell one, probably a hundred but that is it, and public memory is short, we all know!
But then you forgot a little element of internet technology, the ubiquitous link! The linking ensures that the "transaction cost" of sharing information is dramatically lowered, and moreover, it stays out there for eternity. So a consumer doesn't have to shout from the rooftops to spread word of a bad product, he can just link it! A little lesson of geometric progression will let you imagine its power of extent. So we had till yesterday, either the government or the media only to rely on for even the iota of reliable information that it passes on. Until the transaction cost of "creating, possessing and passing on information" got dramatically lowered! The "transaction costs" of free speech have just hit the bottom! And the results are telling! The law will grapple with the technicalities while the technology will leave the law behind.
For all you producers of defective products or misleading information, do not make the mistake of underestimating the power of "word of mouth" or "link of blog." IIPM is not the final and neither the greatest "martyr"!The power of a democratic press in now in your hands, and blogs will lead the revolution!
Rok Sako To Rok Lo
posted by Naveen Mandava at 4:17 PM - Permalink
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