Ok, we've gone from "top tier venue, basically impossible to have a large fraction of poor papers submitted" to "Most papers are filler in retrospect" and "conferences need to accept a decent number of papers so that people will show up and cover the costs of the meeting". I guess if I am deciding whether or not to hire a professor I would be tempted to disregard publications in this conference.
"Listen to me, get out of here and move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened." -Don Draper, Mad Men, Season 2 Episode 5.
I think it's a huge hit to their brand image with consumers if this is true, because they haven't sold woefully underprovisioned current-model-year iPhones before, at least that I can recall.
I have heard the argument that they offer the smaller storage devices for institutional bulk purchase (think high school iPads with a narrower range of use cases and a managed and/or limited base of installed software), but if that's the case they should stop offering those models to consumers in general.
I suspect what he is saying is that people who probably had no visibility into the state of the Sony's security and certainly had no ability to influence it are unfortunate victims here. While security is difficult to measure and therefore difficult to manage and improve, it remains the responsibility of executives to allocate resources against that problem and it is they who ultimately bear the majority of the blame when the security posture falls short.
I think it's important to at least acknowledge the desire a "razor/razorblades" device manufacturer has for maintaining the quality of their brand by controlling to some extent the user experiences that are possible with their tool. To me, this seems similar to Sony and Nintendo wanting the right to certify titles that run on their consoles. You can argue about whether removing freedom from the user is worth the trade for a reliable user experience, and you can argue about the right place to draw the quality line, but they're trying to guarantee a certain minimum level of user experience by doing this.
If Keurig coffee was somehow astoundingly good out of their machine, with their pods, would we have less of a problem with what they are doing?
What Keurig is doing also doesn't prevent another manufacturer from competing with an unencumbered alternative. Shouldn't we expect such a system to compete in the marketplace on its merits?
In many situations the actual cost to a vendor does fluctuate over time, but continuously updating prices has costs that outweigh the upside demand and perhaps brand loyalty that comes from transparency. Some example costs include (a) customer frustration from unpredictable prices and (b) consumers deterring purchasing decisions waiting for prices to reach some threshold they are hoping will arrive one day.
I guess the way to approach it would be to compare the statistics of sexual assault by driver of taxi or similar travel for hire with the statistics we see in the case of Uber and try to discern whether they are meaningfully different.