Wink claims that the move is necessary, as the one-time cost of buying a Wink product is incapable of sustaining their business.
Any more questions as to why Apple prices its hardware the way it does? Any more questions as to why Apple slurps up the majority of profits while others eke out an extremely low margin existence and slowly disappear?
Very good points! Totally agree! Also, people forget that shit that used to be a cost from Apple is now completely free, including major releases. macOS, iOS, iMovie, GarageBand, Keynote, Pages, Numbers, all used to cost money and each major update was an additional cost and now they're all completely free. The exact opposite of what this company is doing.
Maybe they should have thought out their pricing a little better.
You can all but guarantee there will be a lawsuit on this.
Not even a reasonable comparison as Apple uses its substantial revenue from other sources to subsidize its "free" products. Luckily they are not selling us all out to do so. Any gizmo that depends on a 3rd party has a life expectancy. This one was financial.
Had they given a 30 day notice and made the notification sound like they gave a crap, I may have stayed. But, bu'bye. Moving to Hubitat. Far superior tech anyway, instant communication and private.
Better look at their financials if you can as they may not be able to make it work either. It does look like a cool product though.
Where is Wink's business plan? How could they believe one-time purchasers of their products could sustain their business?
Did Wink believe they could sustain the business through selling advertising?
They probably didn't believe it. They were just pressured into doing it by the entire market which thinks everything in high quality software is supposed to be free.
They've now found out, like the rest of the entire software industry, that software is not sustainable as a business unless it is a subscription service. And there is nothing wrong with that.
Unfortunately this fast and desperate move by Wink will be viewed as just that, even if it is the right thing to do.
Software was a sustainable business for decades without subscription scams being “necessary”. Subscriptions are about greed, and, in Wink’s case, apparently having no rational or long-term sustainable business plan. The obsession with “disruptive” and “brave” tech startups is an endless story of self-inflicted injury and short-sighted naivety, but most everyone is stuck in survivorship bias mode and keeps obsessing over this fad-like “business model”.
The model wasn't sustainable because the only people who were surviving were the big players like Adobe and Microsoft who were charging hundreds (and often thousands for upgrades) that were seen as essential. Smaller shops couldn't compete, and software pretty much stagnated. Folk didn't want to pay for upgrades so they just pirated the software instead. That's why subscriptions are popular. If subscriptions had come in sooner then we would've had viable alternatives to
Even today on the app store, the same folk who complain about subscriptions, also complain when they have to pay nearly full price for an upgrade, which I'm afraid is the alternative. Contrary to popular believe, software costs money to develop, and more importantly, support. There's the websites to build, advertising to pay for, and those things are ongoing.
Having said that, I also think that the current model of just paying when there is no real development going on is criminal. Here are few examples:
Fantastical2 just went to subscription. No real change except now they make you sign up to an account outside of the Apple system, charged a hefty fee. They also said that you carry on using a limited version, but they added ugly icons to remind you that you weren't signed up to the full service. I binned it straight away.
Ulysses jumped to the subscription model, and since then, development has only consisted of cosmetic changes and adding stuff that is made available through Apple APIs anyway. Still doesn't support tables, can't do headers or footers without faffing with stylesheets …
But at the other end of the scale we have stuff like IntelliJ. The subscription made it cheaper for those using multiple products, they added a service for syncing settings between your computers, and have continued building their products (new and existing) at a frightening rate, because now they have a stable revenue stream.
Agenda. A great little took for integrating your notes, calendar and reminders.
But here's what both these tools have in common: At any time you stop your subscription, you keep the last version you installed. That seems very fair to me, and I think Apple should enforce this on the app store.
This is precisely why I refuse to use rental software. Once you are signed up they have no incentive whatsoever to do anything except collect checks.
Yes its extortion. I have thousands invested in Wink hardware throughout the house. Plus I spent a long time setting up automation programs (Robots) and the lighting in my home, as well as door bells, motion detectors, and notifications are controlled by the Wink hub. One of the features that sold me on Wink was that if internet went out, the routines and programs were contained in the hub locally and everything would work on the programmed schedule.
Now this? I would never had bought into a system that was subscription based. Never!
Where is Wink's business plan? How could they believe one-time purchasers of their products could sustain their business?
Did Wink believe they could sustain the business through selling advertising?
They probably didn't believe it. They were just pressured into doing it by the entire market which thinks everything in high quality software is supposed to be free.
They've now found out, like the rest of the entire software industry, that software is not sustainable as a business unless it is a subscription service. And there is nothing wrong with that.
Unfortunately this fast and desperate move by Wink will be viewed as just that, even if it is the right thing to do.
Software was a sustainable business for decades without subscription scams being “necessary”. Subscriptions are about greed, and, in Wink’s case, apparently having no rational or long-term sustainable business plan. The obsession with “disruptive” and “brave” tech startups is an endless story of self-inflicted injury and short-sighted naivety, but most everyone is stuck in survivorship bias mode and keeps obsessing over this fad-like “business model”.
The model wasn't sustainable because the only people who were surviving were the big players like Adobe and Microsoft who were charging hundreds (and often thousands for upgrades) that were seen as essential. Smaller shops couldn't compete, and software pretty much stagnated. Folk didn't want to pay for upgrades so they just pirated the software instead. That's why subscriptions are popular. If subscriptions had come in sooner then we would've had viable alternatives to
Even today on the app store, the same folk who complain about subscriptions, also complain when they have to pay nearly full price for an upgrade, which I'm afraid is the alternative. Contrary to popular believe, software costs money to develop, and more importantly, support. There's the websites to build, advertising to pay for, and those things are ongoing.
Having said that, I also think that the current model of just paying when there is no real development going on is criminal. Here are few examples:
Fantastical2 just went to subscription. No real change except now they make you sign up to an account outside of the Apple system, charged a hefty fee. They also said that you carry on using a limited version, but they added ugly icons to remind you that you weren't signed up to the full service. I binned it straight away.
Ulysses jumped to the subscription model, and since then, development has only consisted of cosmetic changes and adding stuff that is made available through Apple APIs anyway. Still doesn't support tables, can't do headers or footers without faffing with stylesheets …
But at the other end of the scale we have stuff like IntelliJ. The subscription made it cheaper for those using multiple products, they added a service for syncing settings between your computers, and have continued building their products (new and existing) at a frightening rate, because now they have a stable revenue stream.
Agenda. A great little took for integrating your notes, calendar and reminders.
But here's what both these tools have in common: At any time you stop your subscription, you keep the last version you installed. That seems very fair to me, and I think Apple should enforce this on the app store.
This is precisely why I refuse to use rental software. Once you are signed up they have no incentive whatsoever to do anything except collect checks.
Huh? Subscriptions can be cancelled, they have an incentive to keep earning that subscription. Contrarily, for a one-time purchase the developer has no fiscal incentive to deliver further updates, unless they can charge for them, or monetise ongoing use of an improved product through advertising.
Yes its extortion. I have thousands invested in Wink hardware throughout the house. Plus I spent a long time setting up automation programs (Robots) and the lighting in my home, as well as door bells, motion detectors, and notifications are controlled by the Wink hub. One of the features that sold me on Wink was that if internet went out, the routines and programs were contained in the hub locally and everything would work on the programmed schedule.
Now this? I would never had bought into a system that was subscription based. Never!
Really? That's a very expensive and useful sounding system that you'll be chucking away for the sake of $60/year.
Yes its extortion. I have thousands invested in Wink hardware throughout the house. Plus I spent a long time setting up automation programs (Robots) and the lighting in my home, as well as door bells, motion detectors, and notifications are controlled by the Wink hub. One of the features that sold me on Wink was that if internet went out, the routines and programs were contained in the hub locally and everything would work on the programmed schedule.
Now this? I would never had bought into a system that was subscription based. Never!
Really? That's a very expensive and useful sounding system that you'll be chucking away for the sake of $60/year.
I never said anything about "chucking away". I will be paying the $5 a month until suitable substitute hub is found. Hopefully in a month or two. I have about 20 light switches, 4 motion detectors, and a door chime, and numerous "smart light bulbs" on my system. They are all compatible z-wave, zigbee, Lutron, and several other universal formats. One big consideration isn't just the $5 petty extortion, but the fact that WINK (company) is in bad financial shape, and I doubt they will be around for much more than a year. This subscription notice that I received awoken me to just how bad their situation was financially. So at some point, I (all of us) will be forced to find a substitution hub. The deal now is to find the best match. The most promising candidate right now is Hubitat. However. I don't look forward to re-associating each device to a new controller. It is time consuming, problematic, and takes time to figure out the sequential logic. It took two months originally to set up wink, device by device, with the 30 to 40 subroutines (Robots as they call it) to get my house running just right.
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