“What a TV Show Can Teach Us About Capitalism”

Adam Davidson, writing about Orange is the New Black for the NY Times:

Prison commissaries are simply one extreme example of an economic arrangement that I think of as the third-party decider. There are lots of businesses in which the person selecting a product or service is not the person who will actually use it. And these are often the more frustrating parts of our economy.

One of my first memories of the corporate world is trying to use Oracle calendar at Google back in 2006, before Google used its own calendar product internally.

It was crap.

I used to wonder what manager at Oracle, sitting in a product review meeting for this utter monstrosity, exclaimed: “Looks great, guys! Ship it!”

Like with most enterprise software sales, the end-user wasn’t the decider. The quality of the product itself just didn’t matter.