A summary from Stephanie Zacharek on Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture. Or, why IKEA and Walmart are bad because they sell cheap products without an identity.
IKEA makes money, and lots of it, by passing on to the consumer the cost of assembling its products, thus turning the consumer into part of its workforce: Depending on how you look at it, we either save money by putting IKEA furniture together ourselves, or we pay for the privilege of putting IKEA furniture together ourselves.
Likewise, Microsoft offloads the cost of making a secure and user-worthy operating system to a user who is required, at extra cost, to maintain the OS and manage security with add-on products.
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