Logitech wants to sell you a subscription mouse some day
Logitech hopes to make a single mouse you'll buy and use forever, but to then stay alive as a company, it will need to somehow charge you a subscription. For a mouse.
No one's mentioned a Forever Keyboard yet.
Especially coming after Logitech launched a whole range of new Mac mice, trackpads, and keyboards, it's very easy to be reminded just how many of these peripherals we get through. It's very easy to see that as an ecological problem, and especially for a firm that is reportedly now aiming to both double its business and cut its carbon footprint in half.
It's just harder to imagine what a mouse subscription would get you, beyond the mouse. Logitech isn't thinking along the lines of Apple's iPhone update program where you would get a new mouse annually, it very definitely thinks that you should get what it's calling a forever mouse.
"The other day, in Ireland, in our innovation center there, one of our team members showed me a forever mouse with the comparison to a watch," Logitech CEO Hanneke Faber told The Verge. "This is a nice watch [said the team member], not a super expensive watch, but I'm not planning to throw that watch away ever."
"So why would I be throwing my mouse or my keyboard away if it's a fantastic-quality, well-designed, software-enabled mouse?" continued Faber. "The forever mouse is one of the things that we'd like to get to."
Faber makes it sound as if she's just been shown this and that it's a nice idea for the far future -- but then she revealed that there is at least a prototype.
"It was a little heavier, it had great software and services that you'd constantly update, and it was beautiful," said Faber. "So I don't think we're necessarily super far away from that."
There are people who will never pay much for a mouse, and they tend to be people who have to keep on buying new ones. Others will see the benefit of paying more now, especially when they can clearly see what better value a higher-end mouse is.
But no one is going to subscribe to a mouse without an equally clear reason. There has to be a benefit to continuing to pay, and it cannot be that the mouse will stop working unless you do.
"The business model obviously is the challenge there," said Faber. She argues that software "is even more important" than hardware, and that its software will keep advancing.
"Our stuff will have to change, but does the hardware have to change? I'm not so sure," she said. "We'll have to obviously fix it and figure out what that business model is."
"We're not at the forever mouse today, but I'm intrigued by the thought," concludes Faber.
It's a thought that seems unworkably preposterous at first. Yet it's as if the whole software industry has pivoted to subscriptions, so if Logitech can make a case for a forever mouse, they probably will.
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Their newer Logi Options+ is making it easier to assign multi-step macros to their mice & keyboards. Some of these macros duplicate other things I'm doing with paid software. If Logitech could compete with those other ones and do it better then I'd consider buying from them, too. But that's not a subscription mouse.
Regardless of what Logitech’s true intentions are on the subject of this story, which I find to be quite speculative, this pattern of recurring charges, or renting, is now the norm with so many things that are part of our everyday lives. It’s practically unavoidable. Taxes, utilities, entertainment, Apple services, Amazon services, internet access, cellphone service, health/home/auto/product insurance, and so on are deeply ingrained and for some of them essential to our quality of life. Saying that you’ll never “rent” anything Is a moot point today. We’re already in it so deep whether we want to call it “renting” or not because if we stop paying for it, the benefit goes away.
Would I rent a mouse, keypad, trackball, or any other sort of thing we now consider a one-time purchase? As long as there are other alternatives and the service based, or “rental,” version does not justify its ongoing fee I would say no. But things can change and if it becomes compelling enough at some point in time, who really knows?
Regarding Logitech, I am a fan of their mouse, trackball, and keyboard products (wish they had not discontinued the K600) because they have served me well for decades. Their software is like a ticking time bomb. When it works and is compatible with everything in the OS, it’s a thing of beauty. But when it screws up, and it sometimes does, make sure you have a backup of your system ready because you’re going to be in a world of hurt. I’ve had to reinstall macOS and Windows 10/11 due to issues with Logi Options and Logi Options+. Just a couple of days ago I ran into an issue where Logi Options+ (on Windows 11) was in a hot spin. Every time I killed the associated tasks it would spin back up on its own and I’d have to kill it again. And again and again. Never ending game of whack-a-mole. I eventually was able to kill it, so I immediately tried to uninstall it. Trust me, Logi Options+ does NOT want to be uninstalled. The option to Uninstall it ignored my clicks. After 4 or 5 attempts it finally uninstalled itself. Hopefully this uninstall garbage would not happen on macOS.
I do like Apple’s keyboards with Touch ID, but why can’t Apple make it multi-device capable or make a small version of the Magic Keyboard in space gray? I put up with Apple’s keyboards only because of Touch ID. Apple’s Magic TrackPad on the other hand is fantastic for what I use it for. When it comes to Apple’s mice, I’m totally blown away by how Apple can keep producing one mouse after another that has at least one very significant flaw. Apple’s mouse designs are like free advertising for Logitech and other mouse builders. They do look pretty in the Apple Store and sometimes have clever features, but every one of them is guaranteed to disappoint you at some point, depending on your threshold of pain or annoyance. Apple should avoid “renting” mice entirely but they should consider paying customers who continue to use their mice.
Prior to iPhone, operating system upgrades were not free. Not for Windows, not for Apple. Then with iPhone and iOS, Apple created the illusion that OS upgrades would be free. In reality, you pay for several years' upgrades and support with the purchase price of your expensive iPhone. Because OSX/MacOS is exclusively written for Macs, Apple soon followed suit there, as well. You pay for several years' upgrades and support with your expensive Mac. This created a competitive advantage against Windows and and Android devices, because Microsoft and Google make very few of the devices that run their operating systems. So they've had to struggle with their pricing structure ever since, because people think of Apple's OS upgrades as "free," even though they've really paid for them up front, so they think Windows and Android should also be "free." Particularly when their operating systems are loaded on hardware designed to be inexpensive, an OS license priced to cover several years' updates is going to cost more than the cheap hardware, so they're pressured not to charge that much up-front. They can't produce those upgrades for free, so they have to look at subscription models, etc.
Anticipating that cost and adding it up-front to the price of the mouse eventually becomes prohibitive, so now they're talking about a subscription. Rather than that, they'd probably do better to let people buy the future upgrades incrementally, in a pseudo-subscription. Initial mouse purchase includes four years of software updates. After that, you can either buy an individual update when it's needed, or pay a little more to get another four years of coverage. Something like that. Nobody's going to want to pay a monthly ransom or their mouse will stop working altogether, even attached to an old computer. They would, however, pay a reasonable fee to make it possible for their new mouse to function fully with a newly purchased computer.
Two things about this “Forever Mouse” idea:
First, there is nothing whatsoever they could add to the mouse software to make it worth a monthly payment. It’s a mouse. You move it and it points. There is NOTHING more they could add.
Secondly, hardware still wears out, still gets broken. You’ll still have to buy another “forever mouse” when the dog chews on this one. So it’s not really forever.
These suggestions are coming from a new CEO who has only been in the job a few months:
https://technologymagazine.com/digital-transformation/who-is-hanneke-faber-new-ceo-of-logitech
What happens often these days with publicly owned companies is they have the big investment funds like Blackrock investing in the company and they have ESG goals. The CEOs then come up with environmental plans e.g make products that last longer. This CEO mentioned a target of 50% carbon footprint while doubling the company. Hence the idea of making products that last longer and finding revenue somewhere else.
They also talk about AI, as everyone does now, and having an AI button on the mouse so people would pay for the cloud service.
The CEO is reportedly on a base salary of $1.3m and will have stock on top. I doubt she cares much about executing on these ideas. A couple of years collecting that paycheck will set her up for a comfortable retirement. Some public companies settle into a scenario with revolving-door CEOs who play the role for the investors while the worker bees keep the wheels turning.