Monopolies aren't good for consumers

The response from consumers to gethuman.com has been tremendous. People are fed up with phone systems that prevent them from getting good customer service, and are increasingly frustrated by the technology that businesses have put in place to keep them from getting to an actual human being. This web site has been a place for consumers to share information, vent frustrations, and draw attention to those businesses that provide good service options to callers, through our Great Customer Service Club.

Consumers also need to know about some of the underlying reasons why most telephone customer service is so bad. The following was sent to me by someone that believes that one of those reasons is a near-monopoly in the computer speech industry.

We all know that monopolies are bad for consumers. If the phone company was still a monopoly, we'd all be waiting weeks to have a Princess Phone installed. Cell phones would still be science fiction. Although some people think that Microsoft is a monopoly in the computer industry, if it really were a monopoly, we wouldn't have Apple laptops, iPods, and browsers from Mozilla, Google, and others. The Internet has been a boon to consumers because so small companies can easily compete to produce products to make our lives easier or more enjoyable, such as MySpace, Facebook, Amazon, eBay, etc.

Nuance Communications makes software for speech recognition, so that callers can speak to telephone systems ("Customer service please"). They also make software that allows the telephone system to speak to callers ("Your checking account balance is forty-seven dollars"). Most people hate these systems. But if done well, many people like these systems and prefer them to pressing 1 for this, 2 for that, etc. In a world of competition, lots of companies would develop these systems, and the companies that design systems that work well would succeed, and companies that produce the terrible systems that we have to deal with today would quickly go out of business.

But Nuance doesn't want competition. They've gone out and bought up most of the companies that used to compete with them. When new companies come along to compete with them, they threaten expensive lawsuits that allege infringement of their patent portfolio. Nuance isn't interested in making life easier for consumers, they just want to sell their consumer un-friendly systems. They don't invest in R&D to create better systems for consumers, they just invest in buying their competitors so they don't have to compete. This strategy is anti-consumer, anti-capitalist, and even anti-American. The result is frustrating phone systems that keep consumers from getting good customer service.

If you agree, tell the people at Nuance to stop bullying their competitors. Tell them that you want open competition. The CEO of Nuance Communications is Paul Ricci and you can email him at: paul.ricci@nuance.com
Posted by Walt at 10/16/2008 10:46 PM
Categories: uncategorized
 
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