News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Google Home Beats Amazon Echo in Q1 2018 Smart Speaker Sh... by alexpetralia on Wednesday May 23, 2018 @11:14PM (#17140803)
Your first point reminds me of a recent podcast[1] where Tren Griffin said that sometimes the hardware is simply a distribution channel for the software, which is where all the margins are. He called this "software in a box."

[1] http://investorfieldguide.com/tren/

Re:Google Home Beats Amazon Echo in Q1 2018 Smart Speaker Sh... by TeMPOraL on Thursday May 24, 2018 @12:34AM (#17141119)
This has been common for years now in the IoT sphere, and begins to infect everything in computing too.

To be honest, I just fucking hate it. When companies turn a product into a service, they can afford selling entry package at a loss, thus driving out competitors who sell products as products. Suddenly, you have yet another thing for which you need recurring payments (instead of one-time), and which will only work as long as the provider likes it. You lose freedom and control.

Re:Google Home Beats Amazon Echo in Q1 2018 Smart Speaker Sh... by kenning on Thursday May 24, 2018 @03:24AM (#17141790)
For me the classic example of this is photoshop. You cannot buy old photoshop licenses anymore because they realized that people are happy with them.