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Your Warrantee Became Void at 17:32:42
My translator negotiates a 3 month warrantee for used phone in Ulan Bataar's mobile phone market. Batteries came with a one week guarantee.
Products can store their own histories - from where they were bought to where they've been, how they interacted with what kind of objects, related behaviours such as 'I see you've been downloading from the darknet, weighting risk assessment', and even your little mishaps. That time you dropped the phone from balcony? Logged. Tried to squeeze your iPod into the back pocket of a pair of low riders? Logged. In the future perfect products are in essence their own warrantee. On the one hand no more looking for where the documentation is stored so you can take it to the store and argue it out with the sales rep, on the other hand no pretending that it wasn't dropped.
Lets start with a basic question - why do companies offer warrantees for their products? Why do people pay extra for 'extended warrantees'? And how does this landscape shift if much of the negotiating to and fro that happens today is logged, automatically? How will people's behaviour change to manipulate the log? How will companies change the conditions of the warrantee in response to these behaviours?
And in a world where bits of data are increasingly communicated in real time why do we have fixed and not relative warrantees?
Writing from Tokyo | June 9, 2006 | Permalink
Comments
hmm.. your post got me thinking, a warrantee/logs/specs/etc. are seldom single, but duplicates or even more replicated. and these replicas have different type of metrics of trust and through comparing the logs, and also the "tangible evidence", support for making a decision is obtained. AND, the more valuable the product/object/thing, the more these logs are replicated and distributed, and secured in order to come close to the reality of the event.
these "power documents" like logs, which are replicated, are then shared also to all the stakeholders. so, i could think, that maybe a third party would be interested in the log, and not so much the vendor.
in such case of the log, i would consider, that it would open new opportunities for insurance companies to offer new insurances for portable products, which are somewhat problematic at the moment. maybe. :)
Posted by: vt at June 13, 2006 12:16 AM