The Roborock vacuum cleaner isn't working
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And for what gain? Perhaps I'm too dumb to understand what massive profits they''ll gain by surveillance of my robot vacuum, but if they can't survive without it, they shouldn't be in business.
Product managers, it really isn't that difficult:
* Make a server available for OTA updates with fixes and new features? Great!
* Require a connection just to run the device you are running? You are selling a plague, and I'll avoid it like one.
* Even where a connection could be genuinely useful for some features of your device, design around it, make the thing independent, and make the connection an OPTION, maybe even an upsell opportunity.
IDK if it is the product managers, MBAs, or investors driving this, but the model of rent-seeking instead of providing real value is pernicious and evil.
</rant>
It costs them very little to add this functionality and the wins are potentially very high.
But that makes my point even stronger - the very commonality of these bullsh*t must-(unnecessarily)-call-home-to-run setups gives cover for this threat.
Also, they might get some useful floor plans, but I'd be astonished if any of the three-letter-agencies would allow one even near the campus. I knew someone who did some software work for the CIA, and the requirement was you do NOT bring any electronics to the building. You specify what you need for hardware, what software will be installed, the configuration, etc, and bring NOTHING electronic to the door. They search you going in, your machine is at your desk per your specs, you do your work, get searched on the way out, and his understanding was that the machine (or at least all storage components) were to be put through a metal shredder on completion of the project.
Letting someone configure an automatic floor-sweeper that needs to get on the network? Right, who is going to authorize that access? And, ya, even if someone did, that network is likely fully airgapped from the outside network.
But yeah, in commercial operations, plausibly even defense contractors, I'm sure they'd get plenty of security-dumb people who'd just happily hook it up and unknowingly send the floorplans to the CCP. I wouldn't put it past 'em.
If you think the type of data that ties a user with how big their home is, how it is located, how many rooms it has, etc. is not valuable, you must live in a cave.
I'm pretty sure this data is super valuable, and Amazon and similar companies would pay a lot for it.
But we're probably 20-30 years, if not less, from most of those assets being written down significantly, if not completely. If the main demand for coal is a few aging power stations and the heritage railway tourist industry, and no banks will lend for new mining infrastructure, how do you extract any value from your deposit? Their direct replacements are nowhere near as compelling for that play-- even if you buy land with good prospects for renewables, you can hardly establish a monopoly on photons or wind.
So we're in a market that's desperately, if subconsciously, searching for the "new oil" -- a cartellable, highly liquid (sorry) asset with near universal tradeability. A lot of the "weird bubbles" lately-- customer data hoarding, cryptocurrency, NFTs-- can easily be pressed tnto that narrative. "There's some trivial use case today, but if we're right, in 30 years, the entire economy will be so dependent on it that major world powers regularly go to war over it." Sounds exactly like the sales pitch you'd make for petroleum in 1860.
Perhaps it isn't as direct as the Scrooge McDucks of the world saying "we're running out of Plan A (oil) rent seeking assets so let's move to Plan B".
It still works even if it is just that capitalists preferentially look for rent-seeking opportunities over value creation because it is easier and longer lasting (and most of them aren't actually smart enough to consistently create value).
Kind of ironic that two movements I see in younger generations are 1) 'anti-capitalism', and 2) 'be minimalist, own as little as possible and rent everything'. #2 falls right into the capitalist's trap.
"Yeah, I know, someone unpublished left-pad again!"