3 ms·

Ah, the “digital transformation”, where hardware becomes a service, and you lose control of it, and corporations extract an income stream from you ad infinitum.

Ah, the “digital transformation”, where hardware becomes a service, and you lose control of it, and corporations extract an income stream from you ad infinitum. While great advances come from availability of technology at a reduced up-front price, at what cost to the basic principles and advantages of ownership, privacy, cost depreciation, long term use of assets, etc. has our new world come? This is a good reminder that “all magic, comes with a price”!

Bartweiss 7y ago
Microsoft used to run Zune ads to the effect that it "cost $30,000" to fill an iPod, while you could get everything you wanted on a Zune for just $15 a month! As many people pointed out, what this actually meant was that a permanent music collection for a Zune cost infinity dollars. Admittedly, at $15/month you could get 166 years of subscription for that $30k. Unless, of course, Microsoft shuttered the program - which they did within a decade. Meanwhile, my decade-old iPod nano still works fine and is still a pretty good music player to take on runs. And really, that was the best case. Microsoft supported their legacy setup long after they stopped selling it, then finally offered refunds and support for importing playlists to Spotify. Newer, post-transformation services have dropped all pretense of guarantees or ownership; the Kindle Store revokes access to titles or whole collections so casually that the words "your library" are essentially a bad joke. Even news has gone the same way. I had a very bad moment the first time I went to link someone to an article and found that the body had been completely rewritten with no editor's note (and not for correctness). News companies aren't profiting on the transition like music sellers did, but basic concepts like newspaper archives and the "paper of record" are thrown into doubt by the loss of ownership and content stability. The story about farmers hacking back ownership of their tractors is surprising only because it's a bit ahead of the curve on hardware. We're still in the early days of this hardware-as-a-service transition, and it's going produce much uglier surprises than the ones we got with software.

Bartweiss 7y ago

Microsoft used to run Zune ads to the effect that it "cost $30,000" to fill an iPod, while you could get everything you wanted on a Zune for just $15 a month! As many people pointed out, what this actually meant was that a permanent music collection for a Zune cost infinity dollars. Admittedly, at $15/month you could get 166 years of subscription for that $30k. Unless, of course, Microsoft shuttered the program - which they did within a decade. Meanwhile, my decade-old iPod nano still works fine and is still a pretty good music player to take on runs. And really, that was the best case. Microsoft supported their legacy setup long after they stopped selling it, then finally offered refunds and support for importing playlists to Spotify. Newer, post-transformation services have dropped all pretense of guarantees or ownership; the Kindle Store revokes access to titles or whole collections so casually that the words "your library" are essentially a bad joke. Even news has gone the same way. I had a very bad moment the first time I went to link someone to an article and found that the body had been completely rewritten with no editor's note (and not for correctness). News companies aren't profiting on the transition like music sellers did, but basic concepts like newspaper archives and the "paper of record" are thrown into doubt by the loss of ownership and content stability. The story about farmers hacking back ownership of their tractors is surprising only because it's a bit ahead of the curve on hardware. We're still in the early days of this hardware-as-a-service transition, and it's going produce much uglier surprises than the ones we got with software.