[mseebach]

No, we're not becoming serfs, we're riding the tip of the wave, where more things are tried out and thus more things fail. There can be no progress without failure.

The gas for your not-Tesla has been provided as-a-service since the first internal combustion engine was invented, and gas has occasionally been unavailable for periods of time (and the price has risen to levels unimaginable just a few decades ago). You're not a serf because you don't stick to a horse and buggy (and keep a workshop for the buggy and a paddock for the horse on your own, private, non-mortgaged property), you're a citizen in a modern economy. Let's not even speak of how you get food.

All these things need to be worked out and be reliable and eventually they will be. Today, alas, was not that day.

[TeMPOraL]

I think the issue is of product vs. service. Most of the things you deal with still function as products - you pay for your food / car / gasoline up front, and you consume it when and how you wish. The gasoline you bought won't magically disappear from your car because its provider decided to change the mixture or update their TOS. You don't have to worry that your supermarket prohibits you from making french fries from potatoes, because your tier only allows boiling them. You don't need to enter into long-term relationships with businesses to access basic consumables; a purchase is a one-time operation, no strings attached.

I don't see it as an issue of reliability - which will always be a problem, because it's only natural for a business to eventually screw you over in the process of wringing out more profits from you. I see replacing products with services as something that limits your ability to live the way you'd like. It forces you to have a stable cashflow to support those services, since you no longer have a product that you can use until it wears out. It forces you to treat physical objects as black boxes - not tools that manipulate reality, but only tokens of services you subscribe to that you cannot open, cannot control, and cannot use beyond what's outlined in TOS. It forces you to engage in unnecessary business relationships with other people. All of that makes your life much more fragile.

Maybe this is a good fit for average middle/upper-class, healthy and mentally stable consumers, especially those without any curiosity and creativity to use items beyond their designated purpose. But it's not a good fit for everyone.

Now, if that was just an option, it'll be great - one could choose the ratio of products to services in their lives. But the market doesn't ask you what you'd like; you choose from what's available. Services are better than products from businesses' point of view, and therefore that's what's being offered (and with extra profit margins over products, services can dupe people into them by the virtue of being cheaper at the moment of signing a contract). I fear that eventually, we'll be left with pretty much everything delivered as a service, with companies dictating how you need to live your life (and screwing you over with impunity).

[ansgri]

I see replacing products with services as something that limits your ability to live the way you'd like.

Good phrasing. Although I do see it as a reliability problem (it is more so if you live in a less technically developed country with not-that-good foreign relation), the inability to have it my way has more immediate impact. The most visible thing is software UIs. If I had bought a product for a precise combination of its hardware and software features, it should be possible to keep away any cardinal redesigns. I still remember the auto-update from Android 2.7 to 3.x (or was it 4?) on my Samsung Galaxy SII, which totally broke the user experience.

Same with websites: nowadays you just can't buy a desktop version of anything, that not only limits the possibility of offline use, but also forces you to deal with unwanted updates. The solution seems to be to use stuff made for boring business customers. Ironically, that makes Apple a viable choice — business customers use them too, around the world, and they cannot ignore them.

[mseebach]

I don't agree that the situation is all that different. Early grocery stores represented a significant loss of control from growing your own. Early supermarkets represented a significant loss of control from the personal, local service of the grocery store. Early automobiles represented a loss of control from having horses in your own stable. And yes, all of those losses were to ever more distant and powerful commercial entities.

But they also brought significant benefits (things got a lot cheaper, especially in terms of time and effort), and it took a while for the loss-of-control/benefit balance to get worked out, but today nobody is seriously arguing that we're serfs because we write software for cash and then spend some of that on food and cars and gas (and a myriad of other things that we probably don't 'control' as such) instead of working the land.

[rebuilder]

Gas is a commodity, while these As-A-Service ( tempting to slightly misspell the acronym..) things tend to be all about lock-in. That's the problem.