I think there’s a cluster of causes for it, but in truth most of the hated companies deserve a fair bit of the hate they receive. They really do suck at providing access to things people want in reliable, understandable ways, and they suck even more at reacting to failures and errors.
I don’t think the primary distinction is that they are enabling rather than direct values. I think monopoly (of airport slots, routes, city wiring access, whatever) plays a large part as well. They don’t have the incentive to compete on many dimensions that customers care about (reliability, customer service, comfort), so they pretty much focus on the unregulated part of pricing, and reducing cost of delivery.
This COMBINES with the feature you point out, in that the primary reason customers pay is for access to other things (distant travel, internet sites, etc.). But there are lots of tools and services which are enabling rather than end-value where the market works well and it’s not horrific to interact with providers.
For what it’s worth, Comcast is really, really good at providing reliable internet access (providing relatively good managed WiFi routers since WiFi is usually the worst part of the network, proactive detection of downtime and service degredation, improving latency even though it’s not a ‘headline number’, maintaining enough slack that they hit the “up to” advertised speed close to 100% of the time, etc.). The only service issue they have is not caring up upload speeds, but there’s a fundamental tradeoff with the legacy cable network and they’re probably right that most people would rather have faster downloads than faster uploads (still makes me sad though).
I’m probably biased because I worked for the cable industry (around a decade ago), but purely looking at service quality, Comcast is actually very impressive.
I think that’s the OP’s point, and he (and you) are correct. Comcast provides, for most people, an incredible service that would have been unthinkably amazing only a few decades ago (I remember pricing out T1 lines in the mid ’90s—low thousands per month for 1.5Mbps).
It’s ALSO true that the gap between what it seems like they could do and what they actually do, especially around communication regarding outages, unexpected edge cases, slowdowns due to shared infrastructure, and bad configuration/provisioning, is frustrating. I can’t remember the last time they noticed an outage before I did, and even though it’s NEVER my equipment (well-monitored Unifi gear), they won’t talk to me until I reboot my damn laptop in addition to their modem.
I think there’s a cluster of causes for it, but in truth most of the hated companies deserve a fair bit of the hate they receive. They really do suck at providing access to things people want in reliable, understandable ways, and they suck even more at reacting to failures and errors.
I don’t think the primary distinction is that they are enabling rather than direct values. I think monopoly (of airport slots, routes, city wiring access, whatever) plays a large part as well. They don’t have the incentive to compete on many dimensions that customers care about (reliability, customer service, comfort), so they pretty much focus on the unregulated part of pricing, and reducing cost of delivery.
This COMBINES with the feature you point out, in that the primary reason customers pay is for access to other things (distant travel, internet sites, etc.). But there are lots of tools and services which are enabling rather than end-value where the market works well and it’s not horrific to interact with providers.
For what it’s worth, Comcast is really, really good at providing reliable internet access (providing relatively good managed WiFi routers since WiFi is usually the worst part of the network, proactive detection of downtime and service degredation, improving latency even though it’s not a ‘headline number’, maintaining enough slack that they hit the “up to” advertised speed close to 100% of the time, etc.). The only service issue they have is not caring up upload speeds, but there’s a fundamental tradeoff with the legacy cable network and they’re probably right that most people would rather have faster downloads than faster uploads (still makes me sad though).
I’m probably biased because I worked for the cable industry (around a decade ago), but purely looking at service quality, Comcast is actually very impressive.
I think that’s the OP’s point, and he (and you) are correct. Comcast provides, for most people, an incredible service that would have been unthinkably amazing only a few decades ago (I remember pricing out T1 lines in the mid ’90s—low thousands per month for 1.5Mbps).
It’s ALSO true that the gap between what it seems like they could do and what they actually do, especially around communication regarding outages, unexpected edge cases, slowdowns due to shared infrastructure, and bad configuration/provisioning, is frustrating. I can’t remember the last time they noticed an outage before I did, and even though it’s NEVER my equipment (well-monitored Unifi gear), they won’t talk to me until I reboot my damn laptop in addition to their modem.