Economist: Chips in Everything

I am afraid to be a part of the problem. Been working with an engineering consulting for the last 3 years.

It now really feels that most of our clients from the West are here for the one thing only: turn physical things into a service a.k.a. devious "Product as a Service model."

It seems to have an extreme appeal to MBA/shareholder-value-babblers types. I saw no stop to them coming for last three years.

All of them want do sell people a widget, but to make it so that even after buying it, you don't own it and have to keep paying to keep using it.

One project I was enticed to jump on recently was an MP3 player that has no option to load music outside a subscription only online store, and it was of course greased with a few layers of harebrained DRMs using public key signing.

That was more revolting than a DRMed baby cradle that I did before, and I decided to forego that project.