Recently, there was a detail in the unredacted court filing in the Adobe case that looked extremely awful for the creative software company. Here’s the relevant passage, with the important part italicized:
Defendants know that these inadequate [annual, paid monthly] plan disclosures harm and mislead consumers but continue to engage in these unlawful practices because better disclosures would hurt Adobe’s bottom line by reducing subscription revenues. As one Adobe executive admitted, the hidden [early termination fee] is “a bit like heroin for Adobe” and “there is absolutely no way to kill off ETF or talk about it more obviously [without] taking a big business hit[.]”
Essentially, Adobe sees the fees associated with its subscriptions, even the ones that are predatory, as so important to its business that it can’t get rid of them without severely bruising its stock market reputation. (The drug reference is just an added quirk.) This is the risk of subscription models, and yet they show up everywhere.
Until now, though, subscriptions have remained tied to software or content. Oh, sure, you could argue that hardware often requires supplies that need to be frequently renewed, like printer ink. But the appeal of the $10/month subscription probably looks amazing to hardware companies that often have to win consumer interest based on the product alone, then support it for years after the fact, slowly eroding profits.
Want a byte-sized version of Hacker News? Try TLDR’s free daily newsletter.
TLDR covers the most interesting tech, science, and coding news in just 5 minutes.
No sports, politics, or weather.
But still, there’s something unsettling about the hinted-at call by Logitech to make what it calls a “forever mouse,” a device that is extremely high-end, like an Apple Watch, but requires a subscription to get updates. Logitech not only wants to charge you more for a mouse, as if you’re going to keep it like a keepsake, but the company wants to add a subscription model. Brought up in an interview between Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel and Logitech CEO Hanneke Faber, the idea is suggested as such:
No. The third way is the traditional model of “we innovate and we have you upgrade.” That’s the current model. And we’re pretty damn good at that model because we have pretty damn good innovators around the company who do come up with fabulous products.
That is definitely the model today. It’s not a bad model at all, especially since we’re continuing to design for more sustainable products. We’re continuing to recycle and refurbish products. All of that is good. But that said, I am intrigued by a forever mouse or forever video conferencing solution that you just update with software and create a business model around that.
In one sense, what Faber is getting at, with Patel’s prodding, is that there is significant e-waste created in the current model of hardware design, where new products are frequently iterated upon to push end-users to upgrade early and often. It would be better if we bought $500 mice to go with our $3,000 laptops, and we used those mice for the next decade or longer. It’s worth noting that Faber came to her role as Logitech’s CEO from Unilever, rather than a traditional tech company, so her experience is more with pricing and dealing with retailers than creating technology. (Not a knock, just an explanation of perspective.)
After this interview drew attention, the company emphasized that a subscription mouse isn’t in the works, that ultimately Faber’s comments are more speculative than anything else. “The 'forever mouse' is not an actual or planned product, but a peek into provocative internal thinking on future possibilities for more sustainable consumer electronics,” a spokesperson for the company said in an emailed comment.
This is actually how Logitech promoted a mouse in 1994, but only in France. Rumor has it that James Cameron saw this ad while on a press tour for True Lies and spent the next 15 years of his life turning into into a movie. OK, I made that up. (Science et vie micro 122/Internet Archive)
Nonetheless, it’s not the first time Logitech has gone down a provocative road. Far from it. In the mid-1990s, the company developed the MouseMan Sensa, which was notable for being designed with a series of visual designs that were unlike anything on the market at the time, with four hues: deep wood, black chess, silver pearl, and blue leopard. A mouse made to look like wood—that was a thing in 1994!
Per the 1996 book New Product Development, Logitech landed on the idea in part because it was trying to stand out from Microsoft, which had started developing mice of its own by this point. As the book states:
The new product would also be called MouseMan to both build upon the existing reputation of the original MouseMan but would be available in two variations, Classic and Sensa to indicate that it was an improved and updated product. However, before it could be designed in detail, the company had to research the various options which were available. Having initiated the original trend in the late 1980s, they were well aware that changing the shape of the product alone was no longer a sufficient innovation for the market: Logitech and their competitors had, over recent years, developed a number of different forms driven from an ergonomic perspective and, to a certain extent, consumers now expected their mice to feel comfortable in the hand, to have buttons positioned in the optimal locations and to also have both a smooth action and a quick response. They therefore had to find something new and resolved to investigate the possibility of introducing a product with a range of different colours, patterns and textures and, to advise them on this, they decided to involve a consultant from the Italian design institute, the Domus Academy. This organization had much experience in advising companies on many aspects of product design to help them accurately to position their products in the market, particularly at the high end. It was felt that they would therefore be the most appropriate people to advise Logitech on what specific combinations of colour, texture and pattern would suit both the product and the market and to recommend how they could be best incorporated within a product which had to be manufactured for a similar price as the competition. Thus the Sensa concept was born.
In the American market, we got this far-less-exciting Logitech ad. (PC World/Internet Archive)
The idea behind Sensa only lasted for one iteration, and was quickly discarded in favor of additional functionality like wheels, optical sensors, and additional buttons. But the devices still maintain an outsize value on the secondary market, with the wood-design models still selling around $150 today—nearly twice their initial asking price—despite the fact that they’re three-button serial mice with no scrolling capabilities.
So, yes, there is something to the idea of Logitech leaning into its Swiss heritage and developing something high-design. It could carry itself more like Rolex if it wanted to.
Now, to be clear, there is plenty of room for a high-end clicking device. Wacom charges as much as $500 for its drawing tablets, which integrate multitouch capabilities, for example. While its models have periodically changed, it largely has the same ones as in the mid-2010s. And one look at the increasingly bespoke and high-end nature of the keyboard space also suggests there is an opportunity for a fancier mouse that doesn’t degrade over time.
But a hardware company like Logitech adding a subscription fee on top of regular updates feels backwards. I know it’s weird to consider, given that we’ve had smartwatches for like a decade, but it was once possible to get a watch without a subscription. A mouse can be a premium experience that can improve over time, but it’s sure as hell not a smartphone. It doesn’t deliver funny videos to you. It’s not like the cursor moves more efficiently if you add AI.
But the problem is, the buy-once-and-use-forever model isn’t as great as it once was in a capitalistic society. It’s great for consumers, to be clear. But in the age of public companies that need to show consistent growth, it starts to look flawed. Businesses that must always show growth, every single quarter, are not businesses designed to make things that last 30 years.
A better approach that would actually make sense for Logitech is to create a modular mouse with upgradeable components, along the lines of a Framework laptop. Make new components until you come up with something you like. Replace the shell so that it’s actual wood, not just a clever visual appearance. Or carbon fiber. Or something else. Want more buttons on the side, or want them on the other side? Swap out the button component. Need a higher-resolution optical sensor? Add it.
This would make more sense for Logitech than running down the same AI road every other vendor is trying to run down. (That said, it may make more sense for Logitech’s other stronghold: webcams.)
If someone added a scroll wheel and an optical sensor to the Mouseman Sensa and gave it USB support, it would be enough for most people. Mice have not improved so much in the past 30 years as to require much more than what Logitech was selling in 1995.
We need fewer businesses to be addicted to what Adobe calls “heroin”—locked-in recurring revenue. Yes, there should be a spot for it. But like any other business model, it is a tool, and leaning too hard into it is dangerous. Long-term, it will damage consumer relationships in favor of short-term profitability. Some coverage of Faber’s comments ignores the fact that she was partly spitballing in response to Patel.
At some point, we need to take a good, hard look at consumerism’s tendency to dilute customer service unless you’re paying for it, forever. There are only so many $10 bills to throw around before we’re out of $10 bills. Maybe a $300 mouse that you buy once but don’t pay a subscription for is the answer. Or a $30 mouse that can be upgraded to a $300 mouse. Anything but another $50 mouse that’ll secretly cost you thousands of dollars over its long lifespan.
Forever Links
Don Lemon learns the hard way: When you’re doing a multi-million dollar deal with an edgelord, sign a contract. He apparently only had a verbal agreement with Elon Musk, and now he’s suing.
Not falling into the trap of writing about the presidential election, but here’s the latest Weird Paul video for no particular reason.
No domain is worth this much money.
--
Find this one an interesting read? Share it with a pal! Would you subscribe to a computer mouse?
Editor’s note: This piece was updated with official denial from Logitech that a subscription mouse is in the works. They’ve just been thinking about it internally, and it bubbled over into Faber’s recent interview.
