Another day, another commentary about why the iPad will or won't take over the world...and thus another Animal-House-scale food fight in the comments. Tribalism is ugly. It ate half an hour of my time, flipping between technical specs & reviews of the WeTab vs. the Adam. Both are Android-powered tablets due (at least in theory) this summer. That's another form of tribalism at work, no question: Like I'm gonna show up at the Linux User's Group flashing anything but... ;-)
But inasmuch as tribes need to revere a common figurehead and revile a common enemy and all that, it didn't occur to me (until seeing the somewhat steep WeTab price-tag) that sunk costs might just be part of the interpersonal duct tape that holds consumer "tribes" together. It's not solely a gadget thing either: Remember "Nobody got fired for buying IBM"? That seemed to last almost into the Lou Gerstner era. True, once upon a time IBM had a reputation for quality (and the premium to go with it). Similarily, Toyota's acceleration problem was attributed to accident well after the company understood the underlying pattern. The mentality can outlive the reality by nearly impossible amounts of time.
And, as with wine, people seem to think that if they paid more for it, it must be worth the extra coin. Right? Riiiiiiight??? That, and once you've shelled out several hundred clams on a new toy or indentured yourself to a phone contract, you don't want to look like a rube. So to emphasize your non-rubeness, you pay for the new shinys as soon as you can find a suitable beggar for the alms of the old ones, and the cycle perpetuates. (Cough. Not that I've ever been guilty of that... Cough, I say. Cough.)
And so the comments-section slag and counter-slag rather disguises the fact that tribes aren't necessarily as close-knit as the Jets-vs.-Sharks ethos would suggest. (My yardstick: If you wouldn't let a fellow slagger crash overnight on your couch, were s/he stranded in town, it's not a tribe.) Thus can sunk costs create a tribe of one. Which I think both sad and scary that "stuff" has the power to do that to people. I just hope that it doesn't happen too often.
