How more and more companies are blurring the line between a product and a service
For some time now, I have been concerned about the incessant attempts of more and more companies to transition from product to service. Products that would work perfectly well as such, and were in fact purchased as such, that are trying to force you to pay for associated services, threatening to render them virtually useless if you don’t agree to pay a monthly subscription.
I fear the latest case is Canary. A home security camera: well designed, works well, with motion detection that you can train by tagging each alert as you receive it, that can be used as an intercom, with an alarm, temperature, humidity and air quality gauges… and at a reasonable price: when it appeared, as a product under construction on Indiegogo, I paid €199 euros for it, and I expected just that: buy a product, install it, and forget about it, that it would simply work when I needed it. Currently, it offers three schemes: pay $169 and have what they call “basic service” included, pay only $12.99 a month, or pay $268 for a year of so-called “premium service”.
The result? Constant messages urging me to subscribe to their premium service, since if I don’t, I will lose many of the product’s features. I can understand that some issues, such as keeping footage in the cloud, entails a cost, but from there to…
