Making coffee was a solved problem 100 years ago.

The trick is to be a tad snobbier about it each passing year to keep it slightly unsolved.

It's either drone delivery or DRMed cofee makers, Keurig-style. How else will you turn a perfectly good product into a service?

False dichotomy; there's many ways to make coffee.

Yes, but the goal isn't to make coffee - it's to create a recurring revenue stream. Coffee is just a bait :).

Clearly you need to register each bean on a blockchain to be sure of its organic provenance; then you can grind, destroy, and turn them into a Non-Fungible Brew.

It surprised me to learn that automatic drip coffee makers were invented only about 50 years ago.

The predecessor (the percolator) was invented 150 years earlier and still has a dedicated following today, and then there is the cafetiere. Both of these do not have any waste other than the coffee grounds, which I think is a big point in their favor. Oh, and no DRM either, nor any subscription components. I guess for the manufacturers that is now a point against them.

You probably haven't tried Australian coffee

Making this coffee and delivering it instantly clearly isn't or this service wouldn't work :)

It most likely isn't instantly.

That's kind of my point, you said it was a solved problem. This is obviously not about just making coffee, you were misrepresenting the problem being solved. Convenience is a thing. If this coffee could be made and delivered on the spot exactly when you want it then this service wouldn't exist.

I meant that the other way around from how you wrote it. As in: you probably can make coffee well within the time that it would take some service to make it and deliver it for you, and likely your locally brewn coffee would be hotter.