Once upon a time, there were three plumbers in a little town called Gamersville. They all had the same plan... provide the Gamevillians with water and make a living doing it. However, the three plumbers disagreed sharply on exactly what was the best way to go about realizing that dream. So they set up their own shops and began to compete with each other, each trying to prove that their way was the better way to go.

The first plumber, Ned, had a lot of experience in the business. He was sure that he knew what people wanted from their plumbing better than anyone else. He told his customers that all that fancy whirlpool bath and steam-shower stuff was too complicated, and that they needed simple solutions offered in new, exciting ways. A lot of people liked his thinking, and he began to do very well.

The second plumber, Mic, had been eager to be the first of the three to open his doors. He managed to get his operation up and running much sooner than the other two, and indeed he grabbed a good share of the market early. He liked to crow about how many customers he had, in fact, and what nice fixtures he put in for people. The thing is, his work wasn't always reliable. Mic ignored that, though, and just talked about how many customers he had... regardless of how many of them were very happy with his work.

The third plumber was Tony, and he liked the fancy fixtures and such as much as Mic, if not more. Tony had had quality concerns before, though, and it had taught him. He decided that he was going to go all-out. He was the most expensive of the three, but he knew that when he did a job, he'd done it right. The thing is, a lot of people weren't happy with his prices, and began to badmouth his business.

Meanwhile, Ned was installing systems of buckets all fed from a well. It was cheap--he didn't charge the customers much and still made a profit--and it was a novelty to have all your plumbing carried by buckets, ropes, and pulleys. It was novel enough that it cought on, and it became fashionable. Mic scoffed at the buckets, sticking to more traditional pipes and valves. In order to maximize profit, though, he used low-grade pipes and considered a few steady drips to be acceptable. The fixtures were very nice... when they worked. Too often, a pipe would burst and the customer would be without running water for days. Tony, meanwhile, began to see cobwebs growing on his toolbox, since he wasn't geting much business.

Finally, Mic was forced to admit that his plumbing had been substandard, and began to fix it for free, at least. Tony was already offering the steepest markdowns on the fixtures he used, but decided that he'd take an even greater hit in order to build a customer base, and lowered his prices. He was still slightly more expensive than Mic, but didn't have the rampant quality problems Mic did, either. He thought that being the only plumber doing traditional plumbing and offering solid reliability would finally get things moving for him.

But one day Tony was talking to a Gamevillian on the street named (for reasons I shan't get into here) John Q. Public, and happened to bring up the subject of plumbing. He was shocked when John told him that he refused to go to Tony's shop, and wanted Tony to go out of business--all because his prices were higher than Mic's or Ned's.

"But Ned doesn't do anything like what I do, and Mic's quality is suspect!"

"I don't care," said John. "Your inital high prices were an insult to me."

"That's not what I intended at all! I provided the best quality I could at the lowest price. If you look at how much a job costs me and how much I charge customers, you'll see that I'm actually giving you a better deal than the other guys."

"I don't care--the price was too high. Mic offered me a lower price."

"But didn't your basement flood? Didn't you end up taking baths in the pond for a few weeks?" Tony asked.

"But the price was better."

"Does that really matter if it doesn't work?"

"I don't understand the question."

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I think you all see the moral of this story... people are stupid.

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