[atleta]

This has been a usual business model for larger vendors (and servers): selling appliances. Google also did it (I think it was for intranet search), it was also one of the story threads in the Silicon Valley sitcom (see "the box").

When I launched my first startup, I also did something similar. Though we were selling a service: we'd deliver it as a 'box' (my co-founder actually called it 'the box' - before SV was aired :) ). It was in 2011, and we didn't have the RasPi back then so we used something called the SheevaPlug [1] . It didn't have a display port, which we'd needed later on, but it was great for plug'n'play'n'forget installation. (Actually one of these is still running at one of our first customers, even though the backing service has been shut down ~5 years ago. Probably nobody knows any more what it's doing and they just think 'better not touch'.)

It's the easiest and most logical way to deliver some of the software/services. It mostly depends on whether it's something you want to interact with on your own machine (and a single machine) or whether you want to have it always running and/or multiple people to access it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug

[davidw]

And having a physical object adds some scarcity into the mix, which you need:

https://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity...

[atleta]

In our case it wasn't the point. It was more about the plug and play (literally, since it was a background music service) vs "install and then keep it running all the time". We had a local competitor and funny enough they pitched themselves with saying "you don't need any special hardware". I.e. they didn't get that it was indeed a feature.

But it was an interesting read.