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]

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".