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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!
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
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.
With all due respect, it's you that missed the point. The piece is actually arguing that hacking should be incorporated into product lifecycle process. It's not arguing that products need to be so pliant that the "painted footprints on the floor" crowd can't use them, but rather that companies embrace the fact that some of their consumers will hack their products and that some of those hacks will be better than the original.