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by Falkon1313 3531 days ago
Which business model works best:

- planned obsolescence cranked to 11, you must replace everything in your house every month

- monthly subscription fees for each lightbulb, refrigerator, and everything else

- all products must refuse to operate unless they can connect to a central update server (which is being DDOSed by competing products made in a country without that government mandate, that are still working, while no products made in your country work)

- company shuts down, goes out of business, and a new company with a different name (but all the same employees and products except for the logo) opens every month

- all software created must be maintained indefinitely into the infinite future for free by...magic elves?

2 comments

This one: Companies offer products that meet a consumer need without creating an effective, easily accessed platform for criminal third parties to tax the rest of us. If they can't do that, then they don't fucking offer the product. "The only way we can sell this is to enable DDOSes by Russian hackers!" is a reason to say "then don't offer the product!"
Fun fact, we have working systems for peer-to-peer publish/subscribe systems that only need a known peer to bootstrap off of, and then are reasonably resilient to nodes disappearing etc. No need to have central update servers - just push a signed message into some random selection of machines and go!