Sunday, January 14, 2018

Mechanical monopolies


I had a warning light appear on my car the other day, in fact it was the little engine shaped one and so I was none the wiser in terms of what the actual problem was, in fact the car behaved quite normally. Of course most car manufacturers have arranged things so that, for most significant or complex issues, you have to pay for one of their mechanics to plug a computer into a socket and get the computer to tell them what precisely is wrong, it's a great way to scrape another fifty or sixty quid from the punter. Having gone through this business of paying to diagnose (when diagnosis was simply plugging in the right software client) then paying again to fix I really came away with a view that the car manufacturing business is not very customer oriented and seriously needs to be disrupted. 

I began thinking, what would be difficult about having a standard app on a conventional phone that did the same thing, and, what would be complex about having a digital market or exchange where bunch of (proximal) companies could then bid against each other in order to secure the "fix business"? Nothing of course, other than the big monopolistic car firms would lose out on a nice little earner, I bet someone somewhere is working on this.

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