How to Make a Company Innovate

This story via Ars Technica relates how Moticello, MN got 50Mbps fiber-to-the-house connections out of TDS. Essentially, all the town had to do was get the residents to vote for it. Why didn't TDS offer the better service to their customers before the whole voting and taxpayer money being spent and lawsuit (brought about by TDS) happened?

We spoke to TDS about the situation last year, and its director of legislative and public relations told us that TDS didn't act earlier because it didn't actually know that people really, really wanted fiber; once the referendum was a success, the company moved quickly to give people what it now knew they wanted.

Uh, yeah, sure. Maybe if these dipshits were more honest I'd like them more. Just come out say "Hey, look, we're cheap fucks, and rolling out faster service with fiber connections is just so much work, and costs money, and really, what we offer is good enough, and who really cares? It's not like people have multiple computers in their houses all connected to the InterTubing downloading gigabytes of illegal software, games, porn, music and movies at the same time. I mean, really, all this advancement just seems silly. I miss the good ol' days of DOS and not needing more than 64K of RAM."

The real punchline, folks, is that sometimes, yes, sometimes, good ol' Capitalism just don't work. Chew on that for a bit and get back to me.