Yeah they don’t have any plans now. After getting shouted at by everyone.
This is just a symptom of the corporate insanity that believes that every year you must make more money than the previous year and simply making a large amount of money isn’t acceptable unless it’s going upwards.
It’s Logitech, they make keyboards and mice they’re not high value items. There’s no innovating that needs to happen here. I’m sure companies that manufacture staples, drawing pins, and paper clips could give them some pointers in calming down and just existing.
They never really did, it was a talking point brought up initially by the interviewer and they guided the CEO into responding to it so that they could have some clickbait headlines. CEO should have known better than to engage and they sure learned that lesson, they’re not going to be talking to that outlet again, but it’s really just shitty interviewing that created this entire news cycle.
So, it’s the interviewers job to not ask potentially embarrassing questions?
The transcript is below. It looks like the CEO definitely had it in mind and was hesitant to say it directly. The interviewer did a good job of getting them to admit it.
The problem is that companies talk to two sets of people and they both want to hear different things.
Users, who want to hear that they’re making a new mouse that costs $5 and lasts forever and gives you a blowjob, and shareholders, who want a $50 a month subscription mouse that harvests the users organs while they’re at it.
And it’s the CEO’s job to keep both of those people just unhappy enough to stick around.
i think users just want a functioning mouse that doesn’t fall apart in months.
They do have great products, they just need to learn, like basically all corpos, to just shut up.
how about linux software
Damage control.
But they’ll implement a one time fee to change your dpi, and then a few years after that it’ll be subscription.
No plans now.
Let’s just float the idea again in a few years and see how much backlash it then produces…
Or just slowly start rolling out and hope no one notices
Release it as an option with the necessary hardware.
Start with a comically low sub price and seemingly great features.
Hook the user base.
Phase out all non-sub options.
Compete enshittification.
Jack up price.
CEO bails under a golden parachute.
Hey hey, let’s not be going around being right and shit…
So it sounds like they did have plans, or at least ideas, for it but are now backtracking after the 100% deserved backlash.
The new CEO had the beginning of an idea in an interview. The interviewer tried to push back while still keeping the interview going, but it became messy real quick.
Same thing happened earlier this year with Wendy’s new CEO. His brilliant plan to make a name for himself was rolling out dynamic pricing. After days of well deserved backlash Wendy’s had to come out and walk it back while insisting they had never planned to use this to do lunch/dinner surge pricing.
Isn’t that what pizzerias and such often do, though, to get more customers in throughout the day? Where I live, a pizza for lunch is often like 20-40% cheaper than a pizza for dinner, and I think that’s actually alright.
If that’s the new CEO’s first idea, good luck, Logitech.
Patel: I’m going to ask this very directly. Can you envision a subscription mouse?
Faber: Possibly.
It was so bad Nilay Patel had to apologize (semi-seriously) about causing a news cycle about a mouse.
every company brainstorms at some point and come up with a few good and a lot of bad ideas;
it doesn’t make it any closer to being a reality, the only difference is that this was made public.
They were running it by to see if the host will accept the parasite. They will be back folks
Some ideas are so bad you make sure they never get released
This idea is so bad it should not have even been brought up
We have subscription services in cars now.
I’m betting it’ll happen either way.
It’s a fucking stupid future.
Exactly–and someone had to make the unpopular decision to announce it and weather the first round of criticisms. They also will be the first to profit from said stupid idea when they roll it out and the dumbs line up to buy it for fomo reasons or whatever
My car has 6 or 7 subscriptions I believe? I lost count.
Weird, my Tesla has 0.
Looks like tesla offers a premium subscription for most things and a separate one for the fancy cruise control… So I assume you have an old model or your being a troll?
Just because they exist don’t mean I have them.
And this is one reason why I hate modern cars. But then again, there’s no alternative, and that sucks.
there’s no alternative
Older cars?
Maybe for now, but there’s fewer and fewer around. In ten-twenty years time it will be hard to find a 90s car with reasonable mileage.
it will probably resurface again and again until people accept it.
They were just throwing it out to gauge reaction. They won’t give up on the idea just yet.
Still 1000% have those plans, they are just going to get quiet about them externally for a bit longer now.
Yep, that’s what I like to call a soft release
Trial balloon.
This one happened to be made of lead.
NOW they don’t because word got out too soon
“Ahahaha. I was kidding. …unless…?”
Absolutely fucking not
I highly recommend the Decoder podcast from The Verge. The host Nilay Patel interviews the Logitech CEO Hanneke Faber and this comes up. He comes at the question earnestly but can’t understand how she tries to justify this. It’s a pretty fun listen. Link: https://www.theverge.com/24206847/logitech-ceo-hanneke-faber-mouse-keyboard-gaming-decoder-podcast-interview
The transcript is there too if you just want to read it. Here’s some of the relavent bits.
What made the mouse a forever mouse?
It was a little heavier, it had great software and services that you’d constantly update, and it was beautiful. So I don’t think we’re necessarily super far away from that.
But, again, I just come back to the cost. You sell me the mouse once. Maybe I’ll pay 200 bucks for it.
The business model obviously is the challenge there. So then software is even more important when you think about it. Can you come up with a service model? In our video conferencing business, that is now a very important part of the model, the services, and it’s critical for corporate customers.
Let’s come to that in a second because that makes sense to me. You sell managed services to enterprises. You price support contracts for cameras and whatever. That’s an ongoing need businesses have. I’m still stuck on, “You’re going to sell me a mouse once and it’s going to have ongoing software updates forever.”
Imagine it’s like your Rolex. You’re going to really love that.
But Rolex has to employ software engineers to ship me over-the-air updates forever.
But the artifact is like your Rolex, and then given that we know the technology that we attach to changes, it’s not going to be like your Rolex in that it doesn’t have to ever change. Our stuff will have to change, but does the hardware have to change? I’m not so sure. We’ll have to obviously fix it and figure out what that business model is. We’re not at the forever mouse today, but I’m intrigued by the thought.>
…
I’m going to ask this very directly. Can you envision a subscription mouse?
Possibly.
And that would be the forever mouse?
Yeah.
So you pay a subscription for software updates to your mouse.
Yeah, and you never have to worry about it again, which is not unlike our video conferencing services today.
But it’s a mouse.
But it’s a mouse, yeah.
I think consumers might perceive those to be very different.
[Laughs] Yes, but it’s gorgeous. Think about it like a diamond-encrusted mouse.
“Yeah, and you never have to worry about it again”, in regards to paying for updates. Just set it to auto pay and never worry about it again 🤑
I would love to see more movement on an open source mouse. I know there are some options out there but it seems like nothing has really stuck.
With 3d printing and the RP2040, these should be more abundant.
I’m sure it probably comes down to the sensors available, but I’d love for someone like Adafruit to offer options.
The Ploopy is pretty popular.
Oof, no bluetooth. Has to be cabled!
I’m still replacing switches on my stupid Logitech MX (faulty design that’s been going for many years) but once it’s dead for good I will switch over to the Ploopy thumb trackball in a heartbeat.
Logi CEO: “Heh, yeah, well you know, there is a rich tradition of tech companies pranking the public with silly, unexpected practical jokes on April 1.”
“But sir, it’s August.”
“Oh, well I guess that’s what makes it so unexpected, heh. Yeah. Unless you want a mouse subscription? No? Oh, just forget that I asked - that was, ah, part of the joke. Apr- August Fools!”
Logitech, buy one of the three tiers based on your needs. 10 clicks a day, 15 clicks a day, or unlimited daily click.
Disclaimer: right click or scroll wheel not included, please purchase add-on package
Logitech mice always get better with age, they give you extra clicks for free with each touch of the button!
Double your Dota APM with this one weird double click!
Vim users laughing that they can get by on the cheapest tier.
I never use my mouse at all in vim
You just burn your hands out faster with the higher numbers of up/down motions to get the work done.
Have you ever learned about the following in VIM:
H,M,L,22H, …,: vertical cursor placementzt,z0,zb: vertical scroll positioning0,,gm,gM: horizontal cursor placementw,e,b: word based cursor movement
Simply holding
jorkat times also works, even more so with a decently high key repeat rate.Of course there’s a lot more: https://vimhelp.org/motion.txt.html
The trick is to only learn a couple new movement mappings at a time and use them during one’s workflow for a while, up until they feel ingrained. Then repeat, iteratively building up one’s movement skills in VIM.
One can say many things about VIM, but not that learning it’s movement mappings will make your required APM (let alone mouse clicks) go up to “get stuff done”. Honestly, once a basic set of these movements has been learned, any other editor without them will feel like a drag.
click here to find out about new exciting keyboard plans from Logitech
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