You think you own your hardware? Think again.
It isn’t unusual for software and cloud applications to be sunsetted — much to the dismay of their fans and users. Years ago, I used a database/note-taking software package called Ecco Pro to keep track of the 30 or so articles that I was responsible for as the executive editor in a popular tech publication. When the company producing Ecco Pro was bought by another company that wasn’t interested in continuing that particular product, I (and a small contingent of others) desperately kept using the last version as long as possible.
And that was before cloud-based applications. Unlike old-fashioned applications that were local clients — in other words, they sat on your computer’s hard drive — applications that you access from the cloud can disappear completely without you being able to do a damn thing about it. In a blog entry I did for Computerworld back in 2014, I listed some of the cloud applications that made my life easier and which disappeared, either because the company failed, or was sold, or simply decided it was no longer profitable to keep supporting the app: Products such as ZumoDrive, Google Notebook, Posterous — the list could go on.
But until recently, it was still possible to hold on to hardware as long as you wanted. Of course, eventually they became too slow, or just outdated, to use any more — but they still worked. I’ve got an old XP laptop that takes so long to churn through its tasks that it feels as though I’m pushing through a snowstorm. But it works.
Now even your hardware is no longer, well, your hardware. Logitech has announced it’s bricking its Harmony Link universal hub device — in other words, it’s not simply abandoning it, leaving the users to make do until the devices become obsolete. According to Gizmodo, the company is actually going to be sending through a firmware update that will incapacitate the units. Originally, the plan was that users still under warranty could get replacements; others would have to pay for replacements (although they would have gotten a discount). However, after some considerable blowback, Logitech has apparently announced that all owners of the Harmony Link will get a Harmony Hub as a free replacement.
While Logitech’s reaction to its users’ anger is appropriate, the whole situation is a pretty good prediction of how much power consumers really will have over the products they purchase. Apparently, it won’t be just our applications we no longer own — we will no longer own our hardware either. We will be told we’re buying them for our own, but we’ll actually be simply renting them temporarily from the companies that sold them to us. If we decide that a piece of hardware that we bought is really nice, and we want to keep using it even if the company feels it’s a bit outdated, that will just be too bad for us.
Welcome to the future.
