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Comment by benrbray | Hacker News Reader

What I don't understand is why a company like this doesn't embrace maker culture. They're already selling some seriously expensive hardware, so raise the price a bit if necessary to ensure a safe profit margin, while making all the software free and open source. The community would design an ecosystem of software around the Cricut for free and they wouldn't need to maintain a garbage web app that can't even parse SVGs correctly.

Their business model should be closer to 3d printers than to inkjet.

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90% of the people I know are not what most hackers would qualify as makers. Think of like teachers, who use it at home after work to make something cute for their classroom or a friend.

By going this route, they almost certainly make more money.

Hacker news users are not normal users.

Truth. And we are the firewall too.

Those ordinary people, who may not realize it even, depend on us to push back hard.

Nobody else will. Few are qualified even.

It is strange to be living in a time where law, government is so damn unaware and apparently, uncaring about these things.

Yes, it's like an informal representative democracy. Those who specialize in something should consider they are part of the minority capable of representing the interests of those who do not specialize in it - tech or otherwise.

The nice thing about tech is that it's possible for us to push back by hacking on stuff and opening it up rather than resorting to legislative tools, and this can have the same effect of forcing those manufacturers hand but without the artificiality of law.

Sadly, legislation will need to be a part of the whole effort.

Tons of us won't like it. And when we don't, we can also point to why we just can't have nice things.

The downside is, we aren't even united.

Many of us really smart geeks thinks Stallman is the way. If we can't see the source code of every single thing we have, we don't have it. Free or die!

Many others of us think that it's more important privacy is respected. Smooth user experiences are more important than perfect freedom of code. So Apple is the way. You may not know the code on your device, but at least it isn't being sold to the world.

And still others think the Google/Facebook way is right. They provide great services to users! Yes they make money selling private data, but their free tools are invaluable to our life.

With such a divided view among the "tech elite", how could we really stop anything?

Agree that federal law is really the only hope for this kind of stuff, but that is rather hard to do for many reasons.

The path to solidarity is when we realize all of those ways have a time, place, manner where they are right, or good, or can be tolerated.

This is not about "the one, right way" at all.

It is all about what makes good sense for humans and that it continues over a longer period of time.

And many of these things are not exclusive.

Smooth does not have to mean closed.

Free with ADS does not have to also mean no privacy.

Etc...

Open, in the Stallman sense, is not always important. Open data vs open code, and machines, who owns, what is actually a rental, etc... can be resolved to something more livable without being draconian, or useless.

Our most esteemed economic mind wrote that businesses exist solely to maximize profit for shareholders. So that is the right business model for our economic system.

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...

Whether you believe that should be our economic system is another matter altogether.

I think we need to modify how we value things.

And it is not "the" right model, just a possible and I would argue short sighted one.

What they did was model up a rental business and seeded it as if it were an ownership type one.

That is predatory, depending on what experience level people are buying. They run a very real risk of not understanding what they are buying.

And that, along with better ways to value externalities, would render that model higher cost and risk, as it should be.

Anyone with sufficient experience sees those costs, risks and also sees them as external to the enterprise, and that it all comes at their own expense.

That expense renders the value proposition far less compelling.

Exactly why this bait and switch happened too.

Just because it is legal, does not make it right or ethical.

Given the rise in these trends, yeah. Time to revisit what is legal.

Yup. The current economic model encourages the path that maximises profit, ethical or otherwise. That might mean predatory behaviour and then blame shifting or just moving on to the next brand and dumping the company with the rotten reputation and its workers.

Until enough people are willing to adopt a different value system, we're stuck with this.

Well, not all of us are stuck. I do spend time educating people, and in my own life I don't buy into any of this garbage. It's totally not worth it.

This is unfortunately the current state of consumer hardware: "monthly recurring revenue" is the number everyone chases, subscriptions are the hotness, and you sell hardware as a loss leader to get people hooked on the subscription. Customers aren't a community you're creating, nor people you serve, they're a natural resource from which you extract dollars.

It's hard to compete against this. If you try to sell hardware at an honest cost, you'll likely be the more expensive option (or you can price-match but you'll have to reduce your quality) and the vast majority of consumer decision making is driven by the immediate price tag.

It's even worse if you're in the venture-funded world. Money is cheap and you're rewarded in the short run by how many "customers" you have, not whether they can be turned into customers whe pay you more than it costs to acquire them.

Because maker culture represents a very small niche within the broader category of people who enjoy making things, and the things that maker culture wants run counter to the company's own business interests.

For example, Cricut probably has a very strong interest in not opening up their devices, because, while they're the most popular consumer device in this space right now, they don't have much of a natural moat. Keeping things closed makes it harder for current users to switch, which, in turn makes it harder for a competitor to compete. Even if they have a technically superior product. This artificial moat is probably much more valuable to them than the lost profits from being less attractive to people who are into both scrapbooking and Hacker News.

The machines are expensive but durable. Their main revenue streams outside of software are materials (which obviously have stiff 3rd party competition) and accessories (most of which are durable, even those that aren't have 3rd party substitutes). They have no other reliable way to extract additional value out of customers. It's not right but it also isn't exactly surprising they'd choose to go down this path.

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