April fool's?

[Bones]

Just purposely creating a scenario of trouble, inplementing it and then coming up with a fix to the problem they created themselves everyone will have to pay for....

Same basic thing I suspect has been going on for years with guys that work for AV and anti-malware companies, then moonlight as creators of viruses and malware/spyware/adware/nagware.
Nothing like having your job security in your own hands.

 

[Noci]

So if I get it right, in the future some of us will become tech criminals because of using illegal mouses without a software subcription, or with hacked software .

I would say to these greedy companies/shareholders: Don't mess with old tech folks, their life sentence is not that long..........

 

[lilhasselhoffer]

What mice did they give you? 5$ ones? 10$ ones?

Neither.

They told me that they had some mice that were left overs...and I should grab one with a dongle that worked. I proceeded to the cabinet of e-waste...and it was empty. They'd decided that instead of wired mice on the line they'd use the wireless garbage, and that any new purchases would not include anything beyond a laptop and power brick.


I was allowed, within reason, to choose the mouse I wanted. Talk to IT, tell them a $5 piece of e-waste was in nobody's interest, so I spent about $40 on a decent adjustable wired mouse. Startech docking stations all around...so not great but not garbage. One of those three jobs was 80+% travel, so I even got to but a decent backpack for my laptop. The only e-waste I've ever been straddled with is an iPhone...but that's just my opinion when you buy a new phone and cannot charge the thing because you don't get a power brick and the laptop isn't scheduled to come in for another two days.


I've also, mind you in quality, upgraded 5 laptops with new RAM, transferred 3 from HDD to SSD, and gotten the pleasure of asking how long a laptop had been overheating. That last one seems weird, but I received it as someone complaining it was slow, I shook it, flipped it over, removed the back, and found somebody had sheared off all of the fan blades....and two days later they were happy to have a "like new" PC that just worked.



Now....bringing this back to the original topic...let's say your average mouse costs about $7. Let's say you replace said mouse around every 8 months...on average. You now have 40 computers that each need a mouse. (12 months/8 months) * $7/mouse * 40 mice = $420.00 per year on a regular burn. At $6 per mouse, 40 mice, 12 months, that's 2880. It's really depressing, but I'm sure a business major out there will compare that as $240 a month to a yearly $420 cost...and people will forget that because it hits multiple times accounting will consider this less impactful...because it's a constant and measurable item which can be planned for....instead of somebody needing to rush out and buy $200 in mice and $60 in batteries because you're out and suddenly causing downtime. I guess I'm just lucky to not have to compare what I use to e-waste...even though I entirely understand some companies only survive on e-waste hand-me-down.

 

[MentalAcetylide]

So...MTBF is M...or mean.

The point was, at least partially, building a mouse "of such quality it would last a lifetime" would require both replacements inside of a normal distribution curve, outside of that curve (think "power user") and simply those that failed because a mean is only average.


My point in using MTBF is that it's a known commodity. If we start talking something like a failure rate of less than 10% for something composed of multiple components which can go bad....and the discussion rapidly approaches the useless conclusion of "if you give me unlimited money I'll give you unlimited things." Of course, in this case we're looking at finite money, over the course of a relatively finite time span, with a very finite opportunity to have something that people regularly already spend a few hundred dollars on for a few years of use making sense as a service instead of a thing.

I think companies should have a "MTBFS" rating: Mean Time Before F***ing Stupid
All this subscription nonsense is just a way for them to keep milking money out of consumers. Forget about making durable products that last, are worth repairing vs. replacing, keep more skilled individuals employed to repair the devices vs. mass production with cheap labor in foreign countries, etc. We're in the throw-away era where company profits rely more on subscriptions or people repeatedly buying the same thing that is cheaply made. Aside from your own home, "durable goods" no longer exist.