A Growing Heap of e-Waste
Driven by the insatiable appetite of consumers for new products and fancy gadgets, designers of consumer products and wearable devices flood the market with snazzy gizmos loaded with “cool” (and all too often meaningless) features. But they also face fierce competition in market segments that can become saturated overnight and demographics with a limited spending budget and brand loyalty that can turn on a dime.
These companies strive on what product strategist call “planned obsolescence”: they design their products to become out-of-date, out-of-vogue, or useless within a short period of time. And they design new products with features that entice consumers to purchase a replacement for a perfectly good product that just a short year or two ago was grabbing headlines and getting rave reviews.
Apple is often at the center of the planned obsolescence debate and is even blamed to maliciously cause older iPhones to grind to a halt. But Apple is hardly the only consumer product manufacturer in this game. For example, Google’s Nexus 5 smartphone is not upgradable to the most recent version of the Android operating system.
Or, take Nest, the darling of consumer IoT fans, thanks to the ungodly sum Google paid for it in 2014. A few months ago, Goggle killed the Revolv home automation hub, which was originally sold with a promise of a lifetime subscription, disabling all home automation systems and leaving customers with a piece of hardware as useful as an empty container of hummus.
The push to innovate in the burgeoning market of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, software and services is understandable. And the fight for market share in consumer wearables and cloud-connected devices will give birth to and then kill many companies and products, leaving behind a trail of useless devices.
Is this endless pile of e-waste an inevitable outcome of the connected-device age?
A Risky Model
It may be worthwhile to consider the more open and backward-compatible models of devices such as Wi-Fi routers and PCs. True, even PCs have to be upgraded in order to keep up with new operating systems, but even an old PC does not become a useless brick when a cloud subscription is turned off arbitrarily. Actually, you can probably install Unix on a 10-year-old PC and won’t know the difference.
The problem isn’t just that IoT companies go out of business. The hardware, software and remotes services of IoT devices are inextricably linked, so a perfectly good device becomes inoperable when the service is terminated, or demands a new software that, by design, is not backward compatible.
By their nature, IoT devices are links in a larger system and value chain. Planned obsolescence and a migration path that are not well thought out are risky. An IoT device that is not upgraded could become incompatible with the rest of the system, degrade performance, and introduce security risks.
IoT device and service companies should adopt an open-model approach that maintains long-term interoperability across devices and services, leveraging open standards and over-the-air software updates. These, in turn, will contribute to a faster pace of innovation and easier adoption of new IoT-based products and services.
Or we will continue to throw empty hummus containers onto the heap of IoT e-waste.
Image: © Joe Barkai