For a decade now suppliers have been fixated with the ‘subscription model’ of commerce. This was based on one of the most frequently violated rules of statistics – you can interpolate but not extrapolate.
It all seems to have started with the mobile phone boom – which, in the early days, saw the cost of the handset bundled into the monthly subscription for the phone service. And, so they reasoned, the public would be equally keen to buy pretty much everything else on the subscription model. Yea! Regular income! The added bonus (from their point of view) was the amount of personal data they could harvest along the way.
The public, however, were not so keen. We noticed the almost total resistance from clients over moving to Office365. Why, they reasoned, should they pay hundreds of pounds per month for a product that they had, historically bought outright?
But some companies took it even further. Our least-favourite printer manufacturer (HP) produced printers that were online 24/7 spying on you, automatically ordering consumables and snitching to Big Brother should you attempt to use compatible toners. And, in the early days, stopping the printer if you persisted. All the while plundering your bank account month in, month out.
Well, the public was less than enthusiastic – and HP have finally given up. Read the story here.