This is the same France from which productive people are fleeing. And Nestlé is not facing up to its own "sanction of the victim" problem. Otherwise, they would just pull the plug on France and not sell machines there at all. But no company does that. Every corporation is in business for profit to its shareholders and morality has nothing to do with it -- or so Milton Friedman claimed. Nestlé will put up with the problems to squeeze out another CHF of temporarily expedient profit if they can. But compatibility is a marketable service. Remember Sony and the betamax? "Beta is better" but it was incompatible. Would you buy a Philips iPod to play Philips artists... and then need a 1000 others for all the labels?... It makes no sense. What if you could only drive your Ford on Ford-brand roads? Sure, they have a right to do whatever they want... but the market points the way. Ignore the market and pay the price. And from another angle, you find out pretty quickly from experience that the "compatible" pods are not. Then they go back to Target and you buy the actual brand name if you want the actual coffee. But we have seen this before. Read about Edison versus Westinghouse. They both made lightbulbs for the home. Edison's had a screw fitting, the kind we all know today. Westinghouse had a bayonet style, a cylinder that set and locked into place. However... you could buy adapters for them so that your Westinghouse bulbs would fit your Edison sockets and vice versa. I did not know about the Nespresso machine. Keurig, I know. For one thing, I never saw a Nespresso, but I have seen Keurigs everywhere. For another, Frog Design happens to have an office here in Austin and they have their Apple // and Keurig on display in the reception area. True, Wozniak and Jobs "invented" the Apple //, but it was never going to sell outside the Homebrew Computer Club if it was not a commercial product. Frog Design did that. Esslinger's products caught the eye of Steve Jobs as he was searching for the design magic that would give Apple Computer a market edge. A multimillion-dollar deal was struck, esslinger design arrived in California, and the company took on a new name: frog design. http://www.frogdesign.com/about/history.html
One problem with Keurig and Nestlé and the others is that you have to drink their coffee. We prefer other brands, other sources. At my office the other day, somoene called me a "coffee snob." I drink a cup a day in the morning. Some mornings, I forget to drink it at all. Other days, I drink tea. Yes, I am a tea snob, too, if you must. Again, we tried buying compatible adapters for the machines in our offices, but nothing was exactly right -- and then you have to clean up the mess... Nespresso and Keurig are conveniences, to be sure. You can have a cup of strawberry decaf and I can have a cup of morning roast and it is all very easy. But the machines are not "inventions" in the true sense. We have all kinds of ways to make coffee here, from french presses to gold-foil filters. Laurel and I actually have separate drippers, side-by-side on the counter. We have carry-out this and carry-in that. And they take all manner of sizes and shapes in paper filters, but mostly just two shapes, compatibility being a marketable attribute of any product. (Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 4/19, 6:21am)
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