Ownership
I am a little puzzled. In recent days an application that I had purchased some time ago to enable me access my personal files within my personal network informed me that an update was available. It is not the first time the application has received an update, and I had let the updates proceed because they generally corrected bugs or improved some aspect of the program.
This time was different. This time the “update” was to remove certain key functionality because of a dispute over the rights to some of the underlying algorithms.
It occurred to me that by applying this update I would then have a program whose functional ability was less than that at the time when I made the purchase, and the lack of such functionality would have influenced my original decision to pay for the program. In other words, they let me buy the product and then replace it with some diminished alternative. Is this fair? A week later I have still not applied the update while I figure out just how badly I will be affected.
This got me to thinking about similar ways in which I’ve observed the Internet/cloud affecting my perception of ownership, and my expectations about the behaviour of what I own. Or what I think I own but in reality now appear to be just leasing… Take those e-books I bought just before my vacation (when I was offline and restricted in the weight I could carry). I recall being in the middle of one of those books and thinking “if only I was online then it might be possible to get an update of this book in which the typos I’ve just seen could be corrected”. Without really noticing, my perception of “book” had loosened to allow the possibility of live updates. Either that or I had been unsuccessful in getting myself out of work mode in which I’m always working with colleagues to make incremental changes to whatever we are constructing. Surely a book should be static? Or is that too yesterday?
I also recently received a rather expensive suite of software (nothing to do with the day job) that installed from optical media in the customary manner. But once I started using this new suite I discovered that all the help is online. And all the help was now pushing the vendor’s latest offering in which the entire suite is available exclusively through the cloud. So not only would the help be dynamic, but the entire functionality of the suite could morph. This sounds like a great way to constanly roll out new functionality without incurring the installation complexity and also staying ahead of the competition. But from a user’s perspective this turns the whole product experience into quicksand. Instead of getting a stable product, you are getting a dynamic service. I’m so glad I got the latest “normal” version of the product before they limit all new customers to the cloud version. The old-fashioned approach of “I own this copy” will do me fine for years, thank you very much.
This shift in the concept of ownership can also be seen in the entertainment business. People no longer expect to own a copy of a piece of music. CDs are rapidly becoming things of the past. Get your music on iTunes, for example, and listen on whatever devices you have. You no longer own a copy of the music; instead you own the right to access the music. At least for as long as the provider of the live stream of digital bits is still in business. (Yes, you can cache a local copy, but you know that’s not really permanent.)
So there is one of the main problems of this kind of ownership. It doesn’t last. Our digital world is not as enduring as the recent past, and what we now think we own can vanish so easily. I’m holding on to my CDs, paperbacks and all the other things I truly own, just in case.
Categorised as: Legal and Political, LUE, Technology