> “When I see a hardware company shifting toward subscription revenue, it makes me wonder if they see decreasing revenue opportunities for their hardware business.”
it’s almost never because of a revenue decline. it’s almost certainly revenue plateauing that’s seen as a problem, in a political economy that simplistically only values ‘more’. i’m sure remarkable could be a good niche business (where niche is many, many millions of dollars), but that’s clearly not enough. diverting limited resources from developing better on-device software to cloud-based software is the telling move here. many companies are capable delivering enough incremental value over time to create a (more slowly) growing, sustainable business without instituting a subscription model (logitech or even pre-itunes apple, for instance).
it’s almost never because of a revenue decline. it’s almost certainly revenue plateauing that’s seen as a problem, in a political economy that simplistically only values ‘more’. i’m sure remarkable could be a good niche business (where niche is many, many millions of dollars), but that’s clearly not enough. diverting limited resources from developing better on-device software to cloud-based software is the telling move here. many companies are capable delivering enough incremental value over time to create a (more slowly) growing, sustainable business without instituting a subscription model (logitech or even pre-itunes apple, for instance).