The search for an ongoing revenue stream is one of the most destructive forces in the tech industry. It leads to some very customer-hostile experiences.
The most frustrating part of tech is how disposable it is by design. It's degenerate and seemingly inescapable.
Plus you are not destroying your old car, they are sold onwards and used for decades by someone anyways. You are probably enabling someone to replace a rusbucket two or three steps down the line, possibly in a condition so bad, it does not pass road worthiness tests.
But now those cars mostly don't exist because we smashed them all up and weren't allowed to part them out either. Instead of spending $20 for $150 worth of parts, now I gotta buy all new Chinese manufacturer replacements for 10X as much.
...isn't that straight worse than rent-to-own...?
But the remaining market is probably big enough.
I think John Deere tractors were especially restrictive for any form of unauthorized rapairs. Restricting access for selected partners is a very customer hostile behavior. It is like printer ink all over again.
Still there are high technically hurdles that can indeed be compared with the smartphone market that still supplies crappy software on otherwise decent phones.
Digital goods (such as music, games, etc) do not count as independent things since they are implemented as software. Also previously things like music you had to perform or distribute physically.
Those all have a non-trivial cost of reproduction.
Now that music is just files, the marginal cost of sending a file down the network wire is proportional to its compressed file size, which is insignificant in relation to the cost of the human labor of creating a master recording.
Also, now that music is encoded digitally, all copies are (usually) perfect reproductions of the original.
Centuries, nay millennia, ago there were starving artists who created great works, only to have the economics of zero marginal cost of production take the food from their mouths. The appearance of and democratization of high-bandwidth telecommunication (enabled by computers, but not a property of computers) did not create that situation, it's only multiplied the zero marginal cost by a large constant. An if you've been paying attention, zero multiplied by anything is still zero.
Before computers, it was nearly impossible to copy a musical song from one person to another faster than the time it took to perform it. And to go that fast, you needed someone trained to perform it well enough (cheap, but not free) and someone trained to memorize it by ear in one take (expensive). To do it more slowly, with more repetitions, you still needed someone that could perform what they had learned, which was cheap, but not free.
The cost of connecting the teacher with the learner was likewise not free. They had to be in the same place, physically. They might meet up, learn each other's repertoire, then split up again, so as to not compete with each other by working the same territory. The invention of written musical notation was a huge leap forward, in that it enabled the profession of composer/lyricist to be separated from that of the musical performer.
Millennia ago, great works were lost completely, because they were not copied enough to survive the deaths of everyone who knew how to reproduce them. That is not a thing that happens when copies are cheap. Even things that were written down have been lost, because copying written materials was not cheap enough until the printing press.
If making a copy takes a specialist four hours, and consumes paper and ink, that is nowhere near "close enough to zero".
Now, you can copy music in a millisecond, using a device that nearly everyone carries in their pocket, to anyone in the world who likewise carries a similar device. The cost is still not zero. It is just now too small to think about, unless you are making millions of copies per second.
One is the VC/investor trap, where the primary unrealized motivation is actually just finding VCs that will fund some scheme to be the "next {insert hopes and dreams of boundless riches}", where far more often than not the winners are the cunning founders (Adam Neumann anyone?) and the VCs, with everyone else left holding the bag (Hello, WeWork starry eyed people that believed the predictions of alien visitation) if the effort can't be pawned off on someone else, or some "exit" to a corp in a kind of reverse defensive blackmail auction to snuff out or keep a competitive advantage from a competitor.
The other thing goin on here is that very predatory and pernicious and rent seeking nature you are directly referring to that seeks to constantly corral and rope in as many consumers as possible as the whole tech industry is rapacious in its lust to generate "ongoing revenue streams" through dependency or even (what used to be illegal) what amounts to predatory pricing and snuffing out alternatives by reaping havoc on the target industry and society. None of these tech companies should have been allowed to use this predatory pricing model to utterly decimate our economy as they have … Amazon, Uber, WeWork, etc. are just a few examples. At the very least it should not be allowed for public money (pensions, etc.) to be invested in companies that are unprofitable at certain ratios, e.g., over 1/4 of their existence.
One clear example comes to mind in Uber/Lyft and their wake of both immoral and illegal actions that have led to the utter collapse of the taxi industry through unfair competition, predatory pricing, and illegality. What we are now left with is a for-hire transportation sector that is now a far less competitive environment (Uber/Lyft compared to roughly 5-20+ taxi companies per city (Ignore the flaws of the industry that are irrelevant to the anti-competitive issue), but we are now also facing a collapse of competition on a far larger scale, essentially Uber/Lyft instead of literally tens of thousands of taxi companies just alone in the USA.
So what happens when the Taxis cannot keep up under the Uber/Lyft onslaught? Well, we know what happens, they use regulatory capture to limit and prevent competition and they start raising rates as they have and are doing.
If you sell software, do you let the old stuff atrophy and become insecure? If not, you are spending salaries on maintenance without any associated revenue. As time goes on, the maintenance costs increase without bringing in another cent.
The shining example for actually doing it right is Jetbrains. There is a schedule for new releases they keep to. You get loyalty discounts for long term subscriptions and ending a subscription entitles you to a version that is ~1 year old in perpetuity.
Plus the prices are (IMHO) entirely reasonable.
Almost no one else does this. Other companies will, say, take the MSRP of the software package, divide it by 12 and give you that as the monthly price with a minimum contract period of 12 months. They'll also restrict you to choose platform when you purchase and may limit the number of installs rather than concurrent users.
No direct affiliation, but I've shared drinks with the devs and am a very pleased user.
This might be bad for a tractor manufacturer; but an everlasting tractor would be great for society, right?
The incentive now is to innovate in order to create a better more efficient product. E.g.; a more fuel efficient tractor which increases productivity - then you'll get another sale.
Deliberately hobbling your product so that it needs repair or replacement disincentives innovation and is a form of rent-seeking https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rentseeking.asp and as such should be treated as a market failure. (I.e., legislated against)
I can't help but think they regret making these things that durable.
The steady progression of new people - some created every day, new homeowners and what have you was enough to give a vibrant business, and ongoing sales.
What changed was the deal.
Pre 1980s most companies tried to balance the needs of all - staff, customers, local area, and shareholders. Post 1980s only the shareholders count, all else is secondary. Products and offerings are made and subscribed accordingly. The few folk still making stuff to last seem to have an anachronistic worldview to go with it. Perhaps still care about craftsmanship, repairability, and reputation, rather than built in obsolescence, subscriptions and DRM'd parts. Now they can sell you the thing 15 times, perhaps 12 of those without good cause apart from greed.
Not exactly "farm tractors that last forever".
Not too different with Hoover vacuums in the era of the Hoover Senior and Junior -- they stuck around, being repaired and reconditioned easily for decades. Had Hoover or Dyson not gone with cheap throwaway plastic for everything when cyclones meant capability improved in post 1980/1990 models we might have those lasting 30+ years easily too. As is they self destruct in a decade or less as more and more bits break. The (cheap plastic) spares that are available are priced such that you're heavily incentivised to replace. One or two commercial brands still make products that might last a while...
Most of the current kitchen appliance brands are mainly now just worthless logos, usually owned en masse in a larger group, probably after a leveraged hostile buyout. Now made in the same single factory and generate churn with new models every year - for the sake of difference not because there is any improvement, just deliberately changed from the previous. Spare parts might be just filter, lamp or element, often deliberately unique to model, and will be available at vastly inflated price for limited time only.
No end of other examples from hand tools, garage equipment, and home goods through to the most complex products.
I think you have a very strong set of rose-tinted glasses. Planned obsolescence was a strategy long before 1980.
I could compare and contrast in just about every sector I can think of. Sure there were some abuses, notably some of the car makers come to mind. The needs of the customers -- beyond making the initial sale -- were far higher up the priority list than today.