There is a downside to subscription pricing for the vendor: they don't get the instant cashflow they're used to. I know Cisco seems to be taking a tactic where only some product lines use subscriptions and the others are on a typical enterprise 3-5 year replacements cycle to provide Cisco with the large cash injections upon upgrade. Tim
On 30 Jun 2016, at 7:00 AM, Seth Mattinen <sethm@rollernet.us> wrote:
On 6/29/16 15:33, Eric Kuhnke wrote: My biggest issue with Meraki is the fundamentally flawed business model, biased in favor of vendor lock in and endlessly recurring payments to the equipment vendor rather than the ISP or enterprise end user.
You should not have to pay a yearly subscription fee to keep your in-house 802.11(abgn/ac) wifi access points operating. The very idea that the equipment you purchased which worked flawlessly on day one will stop working not because it's broken, or obsolete, but because your *subscription* expired...
I'm sure most hardware makers would love to lock in a revenue stream of "keep me working" subscriptions if they could get away with it. From the company's perspective what's not to love about that kind of guaranteed revenue?
I often wonder if Microsoft will someday make Office365 the only way to get Office, which if you don't maintain a subscription your locally installed copy of Word will cease to function.
~Seth