Hey Logitech, every mouse should be a forever mouse

Logitech’s vision of a “forever mouse” isn’t just a bad idea. It’s predatory, and a practice that’s not only bad for consumers but doesn’t even make sense as an actual product.

Here’s what’s going on. Recently, Logitech’s new chief executive Hanneke Faber spoke to The Verge’s Decoder podcast, where Faber mentioned that she’d recently been shown an example of a “forever mouse.” The idea, she said, was that you’d buy a well-made mouse, with great software and services that you’d constantly update, and never throw away.

That sounds great. But then the other shoe dropped: “The business model obviously is the challenge there,” she said. “So then software is even more important when you think about it. Can you come up with a service model?”

And you know where the conversation went next. “So you pay a subscription for software updates to your mouse,” The Verge’s Nilay Patel said.

“Yeah, and you never have to worry about it again,” Faber replied. Facepalm.

There are several major problems with Logitech’s idea of a “forever mouse.” For one, we should expect hardware companies to support their products as a matter of rote. It’s been that way for years. Second, hiding additional features behind a paywall gate sucks. And finally, who needs hardware as a service? It’s a very anti-customer trend, and it needs to stop.

Good companies already support their products

Logitech

When we pay good money for a product, we expect that the manufacturer won’t just hand you the product and walk away. In the car industry, most products are covered by a warranty. In the technology space, products are covered by a warranty and years of support. The European Union has even published proposed rules (PDF) that call for out-of-warranty parts to be serviced by the manufacturer themselves.

And they should be! Most technology products require some form of software driver to interact with other applications and the PC operating system. Those drivers can allow products which are years (even decades) old to run. There are products, even decades old, that still run on Windows, thanks in part to manufacturer support. This is a legacy of component makers who believed enough in their products to continue supporting them until external factors forced their obsolescence — like USB forced out mice that connected to serial ports.

A good company supports its products, period. And for free.

Hiding new features behind a paywall is predatory

Paying a monthly or annual fee, whatever it may be, to access updates to a mouse is predatory. I’m in the process right now of reviewing an entirely separate product whose software service transcribes conversations using AI. It advertises free lifetime transcriptions — but doesn’t let you identify the speakers or export the transcription without an additional fee.

Mark Hachman / IDG

Logitech already supplies services which it has not paywalled — the Flow software that allows your mouse cursor to roam between PCs on the Logitech MX Master series, for example, as well as AI-powered services like the Logi Prompt Builder. The automotive world threw a fit when BMW tried to charge consumers for heated seats. Wouldn’t you hate to see Logitech paywall capabilities behind a subscription? I know I would.

Logi Prompt Builder is currently a feature of the Signature AI Edition M750 Wireless Mouse, and Flow is part of the Logitech MX series. It’s hard to believe that Logitech wouldn’t sweep up all of its best features into a subscription and then gate them inside a “forever mouse” or two. And that would be just a terrible move.

No more hardware as a service!

What really baffles me, however, is that we’ve already gone down this road. HP tried out a subscription printer, then gave up on the idea after consumers revolted. The fact that Logitech is even considering something similar doesn’t even make sense.

This isn’t even difficult argument to make. We simply have too many subscriptions. And they’re moving into hardware, too.

Why? Because over time, hardware has increasingly become influenced by software. Intel, for example, employs thousands of software developers, and AMD executives told me that some of the most important software developers are at their PC customers, who are writing custom code and apps to run on their own PCs. Logitech is no different.

Hardware as a service is becoming more prevalent because software is becoming a more intrinsic part of hardware companies. The hardware industry has always been about exceeding limits: overclocking, for example. As hardware companies have begun to invest in software, hardware has become more like software, attaching permissions, licenses, restrictions and eventually subscriptions to what you can and cannot do.

Does a “forever mouse” even make sense?

I suppose you could argue that if something ever went wrong with a “forever mouse,” Logitech could step in and hand you a replacement. You could say that AI-powered services like Logi Prompt Builder take advantage of expensive AI services, and those services will eventually need to be paid for in some way.

Walmart

But the concept of a “forever mouse” doesn’t really even make sense — because most mice are “forever mice” anyway. Mice can get gummed up by crud, and their switches can eventually wear out, especially if you’re a gamer. But plug in any USB mouse into a Windows PC and it will just work. That’s one of the fundamental principles of the PC — since most everything is backwards-compatible, older devices run, well, forever. About the only major change to mice in the past two decades or so has been the elimination of the PC serial port and its replacement with USB. Bluetooth isn’t going away, either.

And I mean, well, it’s a mouse. Do we really need a mouse subscription?

All Logitech’s talk does is another people who have no desire for another subscription in the first place. And for anyone else considering the same strategy: I’d rather buy from your competition than deal with paying yet another monthly service charge. I suspect I’m not alone.