We seem to be entering into a golden age of pricing complexity:
Desperate airlines are adding or renewing fees for oversize bags and itinerary charges to their already desperately byzantine pricing schedule.
Cell phone companies are adding hidden fees to pricing schedules that already stink of deception. Sprint has one for talking to customer service.
Car rental firms continue to have the sleaziest pricing practices of any industry.
New mobile (GPRS) services are charging for something that even the geekiest users will have a hard time keeping track of: megabytes of web and email usage.
This may foreshadow what we’ll see when software becomes a service.
No one seems to have learned from two of the biggest business successes of the last twenty years: Southwest Airlines and America Online. They did a lot of things right, and one of them was reasonable, predictable pricing in industries where the incumbents were making things as confusing as possible for their customers.
And a year from now, the telecoms will be wondering why GPRS services failed in the market.