Comment by jagged-chisel
10 months ago
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.
The data revenue stream or the subscription revenue stream?
How much revenue can you get from knowing when someone was doing their laundry?
2 replies →
> 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.
> 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.
One can't argue that manufacturers won't try to get away with this stuff, because they will, but one can argue that it's parasitic rent-seeking, which it is. Certainly, there are new classes of device that can be made by leveraging new technology in previously impossible ways, but that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about classes of hardware that functioned perfectly well 100+ years ago (for a bike), or for other cases discussed in this thread less long ago but before the internet age, that are being artificially hobbled to allow additional revenue extraction.
Do a Dell. Sell the laptop. Sell support. This is a win win for customer and business.