In this specific case, I worked with one of the large manufacturers (hi Khronos) and this is their customer: clocking-in is not your business, your business is selling something or running a hospital or whatever and clocking-in is a problem you that want to solve by writing a check. Not by hiring staff to set up or replace broken units (you generally pay a vendor for this) or adding any other overhead to your operation besides a check, and this is a service Khronos would love to charge you for.
Also on a human level, Khronos and orgs like them tend to have a good sales staff that are talented at knocking on the door. Lower-margin sellers can't afford to compete with the (expensive) talents of a good salesperson. Cisco is the gold standard of this behavior, there are almost always cheaper options that will work as well, but as they say, nobody got fired for buying IBM/Cisco and their sales reps skillfully deploy steak dinners and golf trips to IT execs with great success.
I'm glad they haven't got to slick.
There's usually an underpaid employee who has to deal with the devise.
I dread the day where employees are required to wear "productivity" wrist bands, like the one Amazon patented.
I see it coming. The employers will know exactly where (gps), and what every employee is doing.
(The Fairmont Hotel wanted my father to carry around a pager. It was a directive from the Swiglets. (inside joke).
He kept droping it down the elevator shaft. They finally got the hint. They couldn't fire him because he was the only one who could reset the switch gear breakers after a hard rain. The breaker hot bars would bubble (thousands of volt amps) when flooded. My father would walk in the bubbling water to reset the flooded breakers. The only reason he wasen't electrocuted is because it was rain water, and luck. I belive the old hotel fixed the switch gear by now.)
And now that I think about it there's a comment of mine somewhere with a link to a line of connected motion sensors mounted in office chairs to "optimize lightning costs".
edit: found it again:
https://partners.sigfox.com/products/occupancy-and-chair-uti...
Identified needs – why to focus on office chair monitoring?
Data-driven managers love to monitor home officing, track work hours, save space and costs incurred by unoccupied desks when employees work away from an office or on flexible schedules
Companies are willing to avoid wasting money on lighting, heating, and cooling
Facility companies want to optimize cleaning services
There is a shift to working hubs, hot seats and a need for shared space utilization