The Death of Hardware

Hardware is dead, long live hardware...

"Boutique devices like Apple's iPad may command high prices today - but tech hardware itself is on the way to becoming intrinsically worthless, according to MIT professor and tech industry guru Michael Cusumano.

The foundations have already been laid: laptops and high-end smartphones, for example, were once big ticket purchases. Today, however, these previously costly items are given away free with monthly mobile contracts.

It's a trend that will accelerate as time goes on: one day, the biggest profits will not lie in selling gadgets themselves but in controlling the services they allow us to access, Cusumano believes. In the future, tech hardware's primary purpose will be to hook people and organisations into signing up for lucrative network service contracts, making purchases from online application and content stores and using software as a service (SaaS) offerings.

"It's shifting the business model to the service side, and the product becomes a platform on which to deliver these services," he told silicon.com, a process he dubs "servitisation".

I agree with this analysis and one who came up with the same notion many years before this 2010 article was David Brin in  Earth where he discussed how hardware would be a throwaway way back in 1990,  prescient to say the least but then again, Earth is a prescient novel describing what we are seeing today,  among other things, 3D movies, smartphones, ubiquitous communications and global warming. It's a book anyone interested in tech should read. Note: The book takes place in 2038

The worst mistake of first contact, made throughout history by individuals on both sides of every new encounter, has been the unfortunate habit of making assumptions. It often proved fatal.  - David Brin