Is there anything safer on a comic related message board than kicking Diamond Comic Distributors, Inc.? Those poor guys are about as popular as a sexually transmitted disease. You'll also see folks worrying about other parts of comicdom becoming too monopolistic. "The Big 2 are dominating the market share and squeezing out the little guys!" or "Comixology is gaining too much power! I wonder if they'll become the Diamond of the digital era?" This is a common sentiment in other walks of life and if you doubt that, try to find someone who says nice things about "the cable company". For some reason, Americans just love the concept of competition.
But, we had other comic news last week that illustrated what happens when you don't have a dominant player in an industry. Amazon launched their Kindle Fire ("Yay! Competition for Apple and their stupid closed system!") and announced that they would have exclusive comic content from DC Comics ("Boooo! I better still be able to read those comics on my iPad!"). Shortly thereafter, Barnes and Noble announced that it was pulling all of the Kindle-exclusive titles from their stores in a move that was met with universal score by the online community ("Bad business move. I want to be able to buy my comics anywhere I feel like it!").
These moves are all good examples of what happens in a competitive market versus a standardized market. The standardized market is predictable, but doesn't allow for as much innovation and does lead to abuses and sloppy practices by the various players in the market. On the other hand, a competitive market is chaotic and leads to messy things like exclusive deals and retailers boycotting a product over unequal treatment.
I'm fortunate enough to occasionally lecture to undergraduate and graduate students about competitive dynamics and there are two industries that I always use as examples of how standards aren't always bad and how competition isn't always good.
Consider your garden hose. Do you know what size the end of it is? What is the pitch of the threads? Is it threaded right or left-handed? How do you know that a new hose will fit the spigots on your house or will connect with your sprinklers? The answer (of course) is that you don't have to think of any of that because it is all standardized to something called "Garden Hose Thread" in the U.S. And because of GHT, all of our hoses and attachments fit together nicely. Surely there were other designs for garden hoses and some of them may have been superior for certain tasks, but GHT won and that's how it is. Most people are glad that we don't have competition in garden hoses!
Now, go to the area of your house where you store your disposable batteries. What a cluster F%&#! At my house, I have a big ziplock bag that is full of AA, AAA, D, C, 9 volt and odd assortments of camera batteries and those little flat bastards that go into watches and other devices. And, did you know that many camera batteries are just a stack of those little flat batteries with a colorful Duracell wrapper around the mess? And, did you know that many 9-volt batteries are actually composed of a bunch of really long, skinny batteries called AAAA? Why can't life just be like a video game where you have generic "powercells"? I can appreciate that we can't get rid of ALL of the battery sizes, but why must we have AA and AAA? C and D? Just have the engineers locked in a room to knife-fight to the death and establish a standard! If AA wins and my consumer electronics need to be a little larger, so be it!
So, the next time you're inclined to complain about Diamond, just imagine the chaos that could ensue when they go away. It won't all be peaches and cream! Similarly, be careful what you wish for when dreaming of ONE standard being established for all digital comics because the standard might not be quite what you had in mind.
- Dean Stell
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