Comment by dheera
10 months ago
I detest this trend of needing an app for every piece of hardware.
Just put the damn interface on the hardware. You are after all selling the hardware, not the app.
10 months ago
I detest this trend of needing an app for every piece of hardware.
Just put the damn interface on the hardware. You are after all selling the hardware, not the app.
They are not selling the hardware. They are taking your money in exchange for the privilege of utilizing the hardware they created to use a service they built so their customers can obtain data about your usage of the device and whatever it connects to.
I fear that small companies without VC are the only ones interested in making a thing they sell that doesn’t require some ongoing commitment from buyers. And those companies run the risk of folding overnight. It’s fine for the customers since their hardware continues to function, but it’s not an attractive business model.
> so their customers can obtain data about your usage
I can't prove it, but I suspect selling data is a very minor consideration in the appification of everything.
Aside from there actually being people who like that kind of thing (and them apparently being more common than people who like physical forms of self-flagellation), the main benefit of appifying everything is the opportunity to sell you "value-add services", aka sell you a subscription for the hardware you already bought.
I've been in the room when the decision was made to app-ify things. The revenue stream is 100% of the point.
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> but it’s not an attractive business model
It's been the business model for over 100+ years with bikes. It's not an attractive VC buisness models as it cannot needlessly extract wealth beyond the product sale. It is double dipping as you fully pay for the bike, and people fall for it somehow.
The electronic computer didn't exist 100+ years ago. You can't ignore the exponentially growth of technology that has happened and pretend that the market dynamics are the same that they were such a long time ago.
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Do a Dell. Sell the laptop. Sell support. This is a win win for customer and business.
VCs mandate that every possible avenue of rent seeking be exploited in order to maximize the amount and frequency of transactions. You're not getting hardware funded; the VC will steal your idea and pawn it off on some other party capable of exploiting the potential for your product as a service. Because if you don't, someone else will, and they'll have more money to outcompete your product, because enshittification is how FAANG got to be trillion dollar companies.
A person existing is sufficient to make these people assume they are entitled to something for it.
The phrase rent-seeking is such a funny one to me. Like, if rent-seeking is bad that should apply across the board. I.e. being a landlord, literally seeking rent from tenants.
Yet I fear the issue most people on here have with “rent seeking” is the harm it does to a theoretical idea of free market capitalism - rather than the tangible harm of extracting wealth from someone’s need for a place to live.
Rent-seeking is a pretty well-known term that has not much to do with rents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
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There’s a reason people in parts of the US are gravely concerned about the rapid acquisition of housing by PE groups and other large investors. Which, not coincidentally has led to the enshittification of the mobile home park market. Something I wouldn’t have believed possible a decade ago, but her we are.
You’re so close! This is like watching right wing people smugly saying “the phrase women’s rights is such a funny one to me - if we assume women are humans and deserve rights then what next, black rights?” As if they’ve hit a winning argument that of course black people aren’t human and don’t deserve rights so of course women's rights are a nonsense as well.
You've started with the assumption that landlording is a good Capitalist respectable thing and nobody could question it, so mocking the thing a landlord does can't possibly have any legs to stand on. But yes! A landlord seeking rent for doing nothing is a parasite! Yes! It’s rent seeking! The people who really try to defend it as difficult and performing a useful service are bad people who benefit from the status quo and lack the imagination and wider experience to see that things like council housing exists and works and benefits people other than the wealthy landowners. If there are two houses and two families could own them and live in them, turning it into one family owning both plots/houses and the the other family paying rent forever is worse. Turning it into one landlord owning both plots/houses and charging both families to live there forever so they don't have to work for a living is worse again. Turning it into a landlord class who both try to squeeze as much rent as possible while lobbying the authorities to block new-house building and reduce tenant's rights is worse again.
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But how do we know people use the light on the bike if the bike isn't IoT? Bikes need Google Analytics.