The end of ownership

[supergee]

Taking a lesson from the producers of DRM books, Google is shutting down products it sold us and is tired of supporting

Thanx to andrewducker

Comments

[arlie]

Just from your summary, their behaviour seems consistent with my experiences with other software companies. First you get forced updates that push bugs on users who don't want to be early adopters, then forced updates that change the UI drastically, and finally forced upgrades that increase the minimum hardware requirements. All in the name of allowing the provider to only need to support one version, while claiming in public that the purpose is to provide critical security fixes.

And as for google, I'm still looking for a podcast player I like as much as Google Listen, which they killed years ago. That was free, of course, but clearly they've learned that people are OK with moving on to the next "great" thing, except for a few techie dinos whose business they don't care about. They've also got a history of forced updates that change behaviour drastically, in part because they routinely reenable unwanted features the user had turned off. And then there's the model of the Android phone - heavily integrated with google features they've been making harder and harder to use - such as gmail, and the associated contacts. Gmail is NOT "free" from my POV - it's part of my android phone, which I paid rather more for than I've paid for most software. (And the one I bought most recently was a Nexus, so guess which company was my supplier.)

[arlie]

Having now read the article, I see that the basic issue is hardware products dependent on servers in the cloud, which naturally impose ongoing costs on the provider. I'm amazed how hard it is currently to acquire "solutions" that don't rely on the cloud. Too often, those cloud-based solutions don't even provide the user with offline access to their data. Many of them are clearly rented, requiring a monthly fee from the user, on top of any purchase costs.

This has always been a dangerous model - for the users. I've bored all my friends and colleagues ranting about it. I don't use this kind of software for anything vital. And I have a long list of coding projects to work on, producing acceptable (to me) replacements for popular products.

But I got left high-and-dry quite early in my career, when a not-so-successful product was killed by the vendor, with no upgrade path. In this case, my employer had to eat the expense of porting to a different product - which they naturally did not acquire from the original vendor. And I kept the original vendor on my personal black list for literally decades. (Eventually I gave up on blacklisting for that reason, as it is standard operating procedure everywhere, AFAICT.)

So I abandoned Palm rather than moving to the Pre, which was cloud dependent, and thus was not caught when palm finished dying. (Instead, I used a series of less adequate products from other vendors. Those have now caught up to the point where they are merely differently adequate, but I still miss graffiti, syncing to one's own computer (not the cloud), convenient off device data entry, and a UI that didn't receive drastic changes.)

So I lose less data than average, and fewer products, to their provider's normal life cycle. I still get burnt, but mostly on games.

And to do this, I need to be fanatical in my product choices, and miss out on some categories entirely, or build my own out of parts or even source code. Not a feasible strategy for most people, and I'm feeling the pinch of lack of any way to do things other people are doing - things that don't inherently require the cloud.

My biggest recent loss was the product I used to replace palm notes - I have the data, but was unable to transfer it to my most recent cell phone, and have no convenient interface available in any medium. And I've been using google keep as an inadequate replacement - so my new data can be expected to disappear randomly some day. This was about three years ago, and there is a potential solution available - but complex, so it's taken me 3 years to not get around to it. (I can live without access to this data.)

But what really bugs me is that most people seem not to mind at all. The comments I get suggest that data and product loss is normal and reasonable, and I'm just an old fogey for caring. It's all "enjoy the new, forget the old".

[johnpalmer]

What bugs me about this is that it seems like it shouldn't be *too* hard to create a private application for this and allow the product to continue.

But another thing that bugs me about this on a deeper level is, as is said below (well, "above" since my comment came later!) that there are too many people seeing a physical thing that is only a link to something that's out there owned by someone else, and it will only last as long as that someone else gives a damn about it.


Microsoft now offers "Office 365" - you get all of the Office programs, and IN THE CLOUD!!!!!!!!(etc, include the "eleventy-ones" as needed)

And... it's not the world's worst idea. And yet... and yet, I like having Office 2003, or 2010, say, and knowing that, worst case scenario, I still have Microsoft Word and Access and Excel - none of the fanciest bells and whistles, but still I *have* them - forever and ever. And maybe they'll crash, and maybe I'll have to uninstall them every time I want to connect my machine to the internet (because some oddball security mess-up allows them to be compromised even though I'm not actively using them!) but they are by-god-and-golly *MY* programs, for as long as I have a working copy of Windows or a good enough emulator.

It's bad enough that small techie crap like this can fall apart - I know there's some threat of cars failing if a car company's firmware/software isn't supported any longer. I recall hearing that discontinued John Deere tractors have been running into similar issues.