Like with many things in life, I’d wish that forming an opinion on SaaS would be as easy to form as an opinion on the Cowboy Bebop Netflix adaptation. It’s either great, or it sucks, and that’s it. Unfortunately, for everything else from rain to your OS of choice, it’s rather more complex than that.
SaaS has a purpose. you can’t have an entire company going under because not enough people bought their software this month to cover ballooning AWS costs. Employee salaries do not raise and lower proportionally to sales numbers. It also makes piracy rather more difficult and therefore can provide a boost in sales if you are one of those people that thinks that people who pirate your product ever intended to actually buy it.
On the other hand, there is a reason more than a few people still run CS6 versions of Adobe products on their workflow. Sometimes software just gets good enough and feature-rich enough that you feel very comfortable with it and would only wish for maintenance. This is before we get to the rather spicy topic of what constitutes ownership these days; when people are honest-to-god paying money for a receipt of a .jpg and where non-binding EULA’s and streaming services means you find one day to find that the song you liked has been replaced by a new, auto-tuned remix and your audio editing software is now $9.95 a month to use. Or $60/yr for the first year, then $150 afterwards.
All of that leaves consumers in an unfortunate grey area. Especially as software that is familiar to them drops out of support and they are forced to either pay up or find someone else, if they are fortunate enough to be on a market segment where that is an option. On the flip side, more industries are realizing the value of a constant source of income, even if they already have that on their traditional market model.
Which is where we found ourselves a week ago when Toyota confirmed to staff at The Drive that their Key Fob Start would now require an $80/year subscription to function. This is not like Ford’s service where you can pay to get more info and do certain things with your car through your smartphone to impress people who hate you. This is for using the RF keyfob that came with your car and that you have been carrying throughout ownership. There are no server costs for Toyota, in fact, verifying that you’ve paid your protection…err…service fee will create more of that. The signal doesn’t go through the web. It is literally the same functionality that you can get from a $450 kit at Best Buy.
Naturally, consumers and vehicle enthusiasts are up in arms about it. And why not? This is just the latest in increasingly cynical attempts from car manufacturers to introduce and normalize features as a service on vehicles. It wasn’t that long ago that BMW wanted to do the same for using Apple Carplay on their vehicles. The backlash was enough for it to go away.
Though one ends up having to be concerned about having to keep some level of outrage at all times for this. After all, if more manufacturers do it, and if more manufacturers do it, it’ll go down a slippery slope and pretty soon you’re paying $299/yr for heated seats, an electric rear hatch and Qi charging. The hardware for all is, of course, on the “well-equipped” car you “bought”
However, there is one silver lining. Proponents of these features claim that this will allow manufacturers to make a single car which is fully optioned and then just allow owners to choose which options they want at any given time. They say that with the conviction that people will be bothered to pick and choose options every so often. I hear them thinking that sooner or later someone will figure out a way to jailbreak this. That will be interesting. The legal battle if they decide that the car can’t be driven if it’s decided that a car can’t be driven if it detects “unauthorized” software will be hilarious.
