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.
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.
So, it’s the interviewers job to not ask potentially embarrassing questions?
What they want to sell:
A mouse with the quality of the mice 20 years ago. And you need to subscribe to software updates. However the subscription is not optional. If you don’t pay monthly you can’t use the mouse.
What I would actually pay for:
A high quality mouse with an open interface and maybe open source software for it. So I can maintain the software by myself. Usually you can achieve a high quality standard in a few months, and unless there are some driver issues, it should work forever.
I have a “gamer mouse” with a lot of features, custom dpi settings, custom color settings, rebinding keys and so on.
However I used the software once to set it up and on Linux I can’t even change it. I will never receive any updates!
Quality of the mouse of 20 years ago? Are were going to need the cook the eggs extra long to replace the mouse balls again?
We’d already switched to optical mice in 2004.
Which was only 10 years ago.
You might want to check that again.
And feel old? No thanks!
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What I’m wondering is: who the hell is upvoting that?
Me, for one.
What sane people will buy: hey this one’s good enough, plus it’s on sale for $10!
Nah, wouldn’t want to miss the accelerated scroll of the MX Master. Why is this not standard yet, software-side like pointer acceleration?
Ratbagd / Piper doesn’t work for your mouse?
Never tried it. I didn’t knew that existed
Works for my Logi mouse, was very happy when I found the package (thanks nixpkgs search)
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Logitech has, in fact, EOLd parts of the video conferencing hardware. At best it may continue to work but no longer recieve updates. At worst teams and zoom deprecate APIs that are critical and force you to upgrade.
SaaS occasionally makes sense but I’m overall against it. Hardware SaaS has been dumb as fuck since AMD tried to charge us extra to unlock cores we already had on the chip and like 6 seconds until we fished out how to get around it.
I have a POS wireless mouse given to me by a contracting agency in 2004, that still works fine. I traveled with that thing for years.
I think I’m done with Logitech anything, and they were my go-to for lots of stuff since the late 90’s.
think about it like a diamond crusted mouse
Yeah bit it’s not… And it’s a piece of shit hardware that will cost youaybe 5-10 bucks to produce and you’ll soon enough rent it out for 5 bucks per month.
Fuck. You.
one of our team members showed me a forever mouse with the comparison to a watch. This is a nice watch, not a super expensive watch, but I’m not planning to throw that watch away ever.
Then, almost immediately starts talking about Rolex watches as if they are not expensive. This woman is very out of touch with reality like all CEOs.
They do have great products, they just need to learn, like basically all corpos, to just shut up.
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.
how about linux software
Good because the entire idea is completely idiotic.
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.
Still 1000% have those plans, they are just going to get quiet about them externally for a bit longer now.
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.
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.
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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?
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it will probably resurface again and again until people accept it.
Yep, that’s what I like to call a soft release
Trial balloon.
This one happened to be made of lead.
They were just throwing it out to gauge reaction. They won’t give up on the idea just yet.
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.
NOW they don’t because word got out too soon
“Ahahaha. I was kidding. …unless…?”
As shoddy as the QC has been lately, I’m sure they have their consumer base to worry about. I bought a gray lift ergo mouse. Left click stopped working properly after about 3 weeks. Bought a cheaper, legit 3-button with a wheel also. Adjustable, rechargeable cordless. Works wonderfully after a month.
Works wonderfully after a month.
Is that the quality standard these days?
Well when the previous one lasted only three weeks…
Netflix has plans to have a subscription movie service!
CEO: says stupid shit
Corporate Comms: sigh CLEANUP ON AISLE 3
Damage control.
