Is this the future?
Premise: Goods made of bits offer tremendous advantages to providers of said goods.
Therefore, any good that can be described in terms of bits will be.
Therefore, any good that cannot be described in terms of bits that can cheaply phone home will, in the name of better service, causing it to effectively be bits even if it has a physical manifestation.
Therefore, any good that can be described and experienced in terms of bits will cease to be owned and instead be a service.
Therefore, there will be ongoing service costs to all physical goods.
Therefore, because of economics, anything that is a service will eventually get the service turned off.
Therefore, the more we move to bits, the more we have the dead media problem for physical goods.
Observation: Anything with a service that is turned off will get hackers reverse-engineering a fake server to try to keep it functional. That said, I think in most cases platforms die. Hopefuly, a lot of stuff can function with a fake loopback of some sort.
So how long until the Doctrine of First Sale is obsolete entirely? Just wondering.
32 Responses to “Is this the future?”
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RT @raphkoster: Is this the future? http://t.co/0FRTbZo5Xy
RT @raphkoster: Is this the future? http://t.co/0FRTbZo5Xy
RT @raphkoster: Is this the future? http://t.co/0FRTbZo5Xy
@raphkoster I doubt we’ll see the “Internet Fridge” that doesn’t keep things cold without a server connection.
@raphkoster – #2 is a stretch. Not everything that could phone home will for sake of service. The “race to the bottom” will sometimes win.
“Therefore, there will be ongoing service costs to all physical goods.”
Do you think there will ever be a point where the perceived value in having something that is *not* a service, as a differentiator, will halt the slide at a certain point?
RT @raphkoster: Is this the future? http://t.co/0FRTbZo5Xy
Michael Daniel liked this on Facebook.
Yes. A selling point: “we don’t gather your data and don’t connect! Use us when camping offline!” 🙂
I have lost sleep over this. Thanks for the fresh nightmares. 🙂
RT @raphkoster: Is this the future? http://t.co/0FRTbZo5Xy
Not sure I buy the SaaS (“stuff as a service”) model, at least not entirely. There would have to be a significantly lowered cost or increased convenience of, say, using rather than owning a cell phone, refrigerator, or car to make the non-ownership (and potential loss of service at any time) palatable to most people. That could happen, but given all sorts of economic and cultural structures, it seems unlikely in any near term.
Cell phones are a service already…?
Cars are well down this road already too.
fridges have catching up to do!
You don’t own your cell phone? I know a few people who regularly lease cars and treat them as a service, but this a less-than-1% phenomenon. My point is that there’s a level of insecurity inherent in any “… as a service” arrangement, as it can be taken away from you (see Amazon deleting people’s Kindle books for example). The cost/convenience structure has to be dramatically tilted in the consumer’s favor to make up for this, and that’s difficult to make happen with major or vital goods.
I own my cell phone, but it of course reverts to being an iPod touch without cell service. 🙂
What I meant as regards cars…. Cars are increasingly phoning home, unserviceable unless with an authorized provider, and increasingly bundled with subscription services…
I agree with you on the cost/convenience aspect, but I think consumers are actually pretty willing to make the trade in exchange for the right incentive.
According to GM, roughly 25% of cars on the road are leased.
And if you have a cell phone contract, a good chunk of the service charge is a lease payment on the remainder of your (highly subsidized) purchase. Very few people buy their cell phones outright at full retail value.
The degree of attempted lock-in seems to fluctuate with time, so I suspect that it’s more a matter of social and legal expectations than technological determinism. That said, we’re definitely seeing it on the rise. The recent trend towards DRM-free MP3 sales being an exception that shows it’s at least possible to move in that direction.. Unfortunately, I don’t think setting up substitute servers is all that viable as a long term strategy — it’s not technically all that hard to require specific signing keys from the server, and if that’s implemented properly there’s not a lot you can do (though crypto is frequently done improperly, sometimes on purpose).
Raph I think you are spot on and it’s really disappointing. Esp when you consider that (a) the “service” touted as value-add really flips quickly to “how can we turn this into an ongoing revenue stream and/or built-in obsolescence?” , and (b) it also contributes to shipping half-baked product because, hey, you can always push an update into the field later.
RT @raphkoster: Is this the future? http://t.co/0FRTbZo5Xy
I agree with reBang that #2 is a stretch. Provider’s don’t always get their way.
Also, I’m had to read the third paragraph a couple of times before I got your intended meaning. Should “causing” in the third paragraph be “cause”? Or perhaps a “thus” before “causing” would
…help make the sentence easier to understand.
Hit the Post Comment button early.
> I think in most cases platforms die.
At what point will consumers revolt.
How long will it take for a platform provider to put the source code into escrow, as a value added feature, causing competitors to follow suit. Before long it’s the norm; platforms cease to die, instead reborn as small open source projects.
Why would I ever buy a fridge that could be deactivated by a remote service?
Matt: because at some point they offer a “feature” that you want that requires a service and that’s how they get you. Will they have that for a Fridge? who knows. I could have said the same thing about a thermostat, and yet people are installing Nests today.
Raph: To continue down the dystopian rabbit hole:
Financially motivated media companies lobbied for DMCA, and made it illegal to hack your devices – even those you own.
One could imagine it would be even easier for auto manufacturers to make it illegal to root your car to get it to connect to an independant service, under the guise of “the car could be made unsafe” when their main motivation would really be protecting a revenue stream.
>I agree with you on the cost/convenience aspect, but I think consumers are actually pretty willing to make the trade in exchange for the right incentive.
Also on this front, consumers are notoriously short-sighted here, and will make the trade for short term baubles. (e.g. see “introductory rates” on cable tv, etc.)
They have certainly been willing to do it with formerly tangible goods like video and music and game collections.
Formerly tangible is not a useful distinction there because those things were always just information. Their tangibility was incidental to their use. This is not true of appliances, where their tangibility is /essential/ to their use.
And reliability is of utmost importance.
phones, game consoles, tvs. These things used to be appliances. They are now appliances whose “total functionality” is in some portion provided by a service they connect to. That percentage is drifting to the “more services” end over time, and as that happens, their value when disconnected is questionable.
I seem to recall just recently buying a TV that has no connectivity requirements whatsoever. Phones have always had a total connectivity requirement, they’re a connecting device and that’s the entirety of what a phone does. And my game consoles still work as fine as they always have without an internet connection, even though MS made a move to try and take this away from us. You see how well that went…
But I guess if our political systems keep moving toward oligarchical corporate control then eventually the refrigerator monopoly can force everyone to pay $20 a month to the company store to keep their food cold and it won’t matter what consumers actually want.