We're buying products whose core functionality, or for which bricking functionality, relies on software outside the device that costs money to maintain. If you

We're buying products whose core functionality, or for which bricking functionality, relies on software outside the device that costs money to maintain. If you're buying stuff that relies on the cloud to run, you're just buying the plastic and silicon, not the actual capabilities those deliver. Maybe the law needs to define what "lifetime" means, and whether a company that buys another company inherits the lifetime of their products. Maybe Nest should have spent some time and money updating the services so that things would run off of existing Nest cloud services and turn these Hubs in to weird-colored Nest devices. But, the bigger issue is thinking that we're buying capability when we're buying just the plastic and bits through which the capability arrives. If we want to buy the capability, we need to start demanding that again.