My original iPad can’t be upgraded anymore and was “out-of-lifed” roughly two years after I bought it, or about 30 months from its original release. Companies don’t have to provide unlimited software updates indefinitely for the devices they sell, even if it potentially exposes users to Internet virus or simply annoying bugs. But I can relate a bit to the case when you buy a new cellphone at the end of 2011 for a two or three year contract, sold with an explicit promise of software updates for 18 months, and being told after no update happened in the past 16 months that there won’t be any updates, ever. This is what happened to Motorola Photon 4G buyers.
As devices are almost always Internet-connected nowadays, users are now expecting their devices to be up-to-date with the rest of the Internet for a reasonable life span. But for the device makers, that makes no sense in term of revenue, unless the device enables a walled market of electronic goods that creates revenue past the initial sale of the device. This works great with video game consoles, iOS devices and the Amazon Kindle, but with Android phones the revenue equation is broken between Google, the phone maker and the cell service provider.
No wonder cell service providers saw a gold mine in ringtones. As they’re becoming more and more “dumb Internet pipes”, their revenue margins are growing thinner (well, from obscene to reasonable). Cell phone makers are stuck in the same situation than with PCs, seeing Microsoft enter the hardware market. So how Motorola, in the name of cost-cutting, would not upgrade all their 2011 phones to Android 4.0 or 4.1, which would benefit the software marketplace of their parent company, Google, simply doesn’t make any business sense. Contrast that with a coworker updating an aging iPhone 3GS, initially released 40 months ago, to a system released two weeks ago, you can understand why the Google app marketplace suffers.
While Zune was a fiasco and I expect the same for Windows 8 (phone and desktop versions), Microsoft “got it” with the Xbox 360: Your device is there to place your foot in the door, giving you the great opportunity to sell stuff for years. You don’t want to antagonize your existing user base: You want to make them want to come back and buy more software stuff after the initial purchase. And you do so by updating and expanding your device for many, many years, not by telling your users to go away six months later just because the cell providers told you so.
Published on October 6, 2012 at 21:32 EDT
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