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Hack This, Please
Andy Kessler, the author of Wall Street Meat had a recent piece in the WSJ, and now reprinted on his own site. It's a piece about how companies are shifting much more to "hacker" friendly models. It's a particular area of interest for me, as it's something that I've talked about with the folks at BCG for a while.
The hacker hostile business methods of cue:cat and iOpener sure helped those companies... helped them disappear!
I recall one of Steve Jobs' big failures. He created an "ultimate remote control" that did everything but get your beer for you. It was a massive failure. Why? Too complicated. People didn't want an infinitely programmable remote control.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Instead of simply configuring your PC to suit your needs, you buy some exotic pieces of hardware to do the very same tasks but the hard way.
While I don't mind versatility, things should not be sold to do something different from what they were designed for.
I think that encouraging the "hacking" of your products, or not actively discouraging, helps to develop very dedicated fans (see Tivo). It also give people who have the desire and skills to modify the equipment a greater sense of ownership and/or control of THIER device. As a side benfit it allows a company to effectively outsource a portion of the R&D effort to actual customers. A nice cheap way to find out what people want. If they then incorperate these hacks into future models the the "I want it to just work crowd" can benfit too.
The biggest problem with this idea is that allowing your product to be easily changed by the end user is a recipe for technical support disaster. That's why every branded PC you buy these days doesn't just come with a disk to reinstall the OS, it comes with a "System Restore" CD. So that when you call Dell, HP, Gateway, eMachine, etc. with a problem, they walk you through the few simple things to determine if it is a hardware or software problem. As soon as they feel they can eliminate a hardware failure, the next suggestion is use the restore CD, simply because they can't afford to spend the time trying to figure out what you did to your PC to mess it up.
If your toaster becomes deliberately (by the manufacturer) "hackable" then they can no longer have those big warnings that tinkering with the device voids the warranty, and they will also have to hire a massive support group to get all those messed up toasters working again.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
Companies have a much stronger interest in preventing, not encouraging, end-user modification of their products. This is because they want to charge you for extra features and upgrades. Consider one of the most obvious and prevalent examples of computer hardware hacking (which the authors failed to mention although I am sure it was in their minds): CPU overclocking. Intel has no interest in making it easy for you to buy one of their inexpensive CPUs and making it run like one of their premium CPUs with no benefit to them. To the contrary, their entire pricing model is based on charging you extra for those capabilities.
Yes, there is the occasional product that gains geek cult status because the manufacturer encourages end-user hacking (e.g., Lego Mindstorms). But those products are already aimed at that particular segment of the market. Makers of mass-market electronics, on the other hand, have no interest in letting you upgrade their products when they would much rather sell you the upgrade.
There are two primary reasons that are holding back major corporations from opening their goods to hackign. The first is liability, the second is money.
Concerning liability, companies are rightly paralyzed with fear that they could be held responsible for making a product that can be modified to do illegal and/or unpleasant things. Take, for example, the TiVo situation. Just because they took out the ad-skipping feature by default, doesn't mean that they cannot theoretically be held responsible for allowing their product to be hacked in such a way to put the feature back in. And hacking cars is even more legally dangerous. In short: while corporations ensure that their goods meet the requirements of current legal code, there is no way to ensure that a hacked product will still be in compliance. It is highly likely that corporations can be held liable for this.
Second: corporations exist to make money. The reason that most companies don't want their product to be hacked is that they don't want you to find that feature for yourself, they want to find it first and sell it to you. If you add a feature they didn't sell you, they lose. There is a way around this, fortunately, and Apple has already taken it. Simply reserve the right to include and market any hacks that consumers come up with. But finding the hacks that would have market value is hard enough: finding the hacks with market value that are legal is even harder.
They are also wrong when they say that there are companies that truly want users to hack their mass-market electronic products. Here is the killer counter-argument:
Name one manufacturer of a mass-market electronic product (including the Roomba described in the article) that will not instantly void your product warranty for doing the things described in this article.
Racing *was*, and occasionally *is still* a major source for automotive innvations to control a car at high speed. Hacks like this are the modern equivalent for non-racing items. Play with it break it, see if you can make it better.
meh
where do you think those models came from? business has been around a lot longer than computers...
perl -e '$_="\007/4`\cp%2,".chr(127);s/./"\"\\c$&\""/gees
Most of the time, voiding the warranty makes perfect sense when you're talking about hacking.
Lets say I take apart my TiVo/Roomba whatever, put it back together, and it doesn't work right. If it was working before I took it apart, and it doesn't work when I put it back together, how can the company honor a warranty? They have absolutely no assurance that you didnt fsck something up while you were poking around. Do you really expect them to say, "You were hacking, so it's okay you broke it. we'll send you a replacement."
Voiding the warrant makes sense, regardless of their position on hacking.