They Need Your Money

We all know how tough it is to make a living these days in the high-tech biz. If the Man ain't shipping your job over to Bangalore, he's cutting staff to make his numbers so that his boss doesn't lay him off.

If we didn't buy the latest whizzy stuff that the consumer networking companies come up with, then we're just letting the terrorists win. No wait, that's the justification for a different marketing campaign...

Seriously, it's our duty as consumers to buy this stuff. Both the chip and end-product makers know that the "enterprise" guys are too chicken to buy gear based on ideas that real smart people are still working the kinks out of.

But they also know they can get us to buy anything if they dangle the right bright shiny thing in front of us. So I say, let's step up to the checkout and pull out our wallets. Someone has to help these poor companies pay their bills until they can make products good enough that real companies will buy them.

We Need To Work Together

In the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth, companies used to carefully test products before they made them available to consumers. They even paid employees to do this. And companies had slogans like "zero defects" and "quality is our most important product."

But who has time for that today? This is the new millennium and competition is everywhere. If you don't get your product out there first, then you might as well just give up...you loser!

But today's sophisticated products with super-advanced technology require equally advanced testing. Especially this wireless stuff, which tends to be kind of squirrelly, anyway.

So let's all pitch in and help out by not only volunteering our time, but also paying full price for the privilege of improving our problem-solving skills. And how about the opportunity to talk with people in faraway lands...or at least wait for hours to talk with them? Why, this international spirit of cooperation might just make the world a better place! Don't our kids deserve this?