My pet bugbear is companies selling products, but hiding their pricing information behind a "contact our sales team" note. Why is this acceptable?
Even Google, normally good at making life simple and with their mission statement "organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful" have this fault (i.e. "Contact Sales" on https://www.google.com/work/mapsearth/products/mapsapi.html)
How can we fix this?
My initial thoughts:
* an Open Data project
everyone buying something with hidden pricing reveals what they paid
along with any price-affecting data. e.g.
- type of license(s)
- number of licenses
- number of service requests per day
- number of vCPUs
- volume of data (GBs)
* an ISO for open operating practices:
In the same way we now have a standard for cloud privacy* we should have one for open practices.
This ISO would ensure that companies are forced to make available information which
would normally be requested and gradually uncovered via a RFI (request for information) process.
e.g.
- number of employees \
- years operating |_ used to asses whether the company may go bust soon
- annual turnover for past 3 years |
- annual profit for previous 3 years /
- price / formula to calculate price of product(s)
This wouldn't be mandatory (some companies wouldn't do well if that were the case),
but if the ISO became established could become something companies would want to opt in to.
(*ref: http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/02/16/azure-first-cloud-computing-platform-to-conform-to-isoiec-27018-only-international-set-of-privacy-controls-in-the-cloud/).
What are your thoughts? Would the above suggestions work, or do you have any of your own?
How can we fix this?
My initial thoughts:
What are your thoughts? Would the above suggestions work, or do you have any of your own?