Sometimes I cannot fathom the depth of laziness we have gone into,But hey.. Laziness has been the driving force for the evolution of humans
To me, it just reeks of a classic Internet of Shit kind of model, where tech is imposed on a product not because it makes the product better, but because it makes the product more expensive and exclusive.
I mean, Keurig has had a ridiculously successful run doing the same basic thing: Stick a low cost commodity product into a pricey DRM-protected package and sell expensive devices to extract the commodity product from said packaging. Coffee makers have never been hard to use, and yet, somehow Keurig sells billions of K-cups. So...maybe these folks figured they'd reproduce that model, and maybe their investors believed they could do so.
A compression product like that would be a much easier sell to enterprise if it's on-premise than as a cloud service.