William Gallagher
Logitech hopes to make a single mouse you'll buy and use forever, but to then stay alive as a company, it will need to somehow charge you a subscription. For a mouse.
Especially coming after Logitech launched a whole range of new Mac mice, trackpads, and keyboards, it's very easy to be reminded just how many of these peripherals we get through. It's very easy to see that as an ecological problem, and especially for a firm that is reportedly now aiming to both double its business and cut its carbon footprint in half.
It's just harder to imagine what a mouse subscription would get you, beyond the mouse. Logitech isn't thinking along the lines of Apple's iPhone update program where you would get a new mouse annually, it very definitely thinks that you should get what it's calling a forever mouse.
"The other day, in Ireland, in our innovation center there, one of our team members showed me a forever mouse with the comparison to a watch," Logitech CEO Hanneke Faber told The Verge. "This is a nice watch [said the team member], not a super expensive watch, but I'm not planning to throw that watch away ever."
"So why would I be throwing my mouse or my keyboard away if it's a fantastic-quality, well-designed, software-enabled mouse?" continued Faber. "The forever mouse is one of the things that we'd like to get to."
Faber makes it sound as if she's just been shown this and that it's a nice idea for the far future — but then she revealed that there is at least a prototype.
"It was a little heavier, it had great software and services that you'd constantly update, and it was beautiful," said Faber. "So I don't think we're necessarily super far away from that."
There are people who will never pay much for a mouse, and they tend to be people who have to keep on buying new ones. Others will see the benefit of paying more now, especially when they can clearly see what better value a higher-end mouse is.
But no one is going to subscribe to a mouse without an equally clear reason. There has to be a benefit to continuing to pay, and it cannot be that the mouse will stop working unless you do.
"The business model obviously is the challenge there," said Faber. She argues that software "is even more important" than hardware, and that its software will keep advancing.
"Our stuff will have to change, but does the hardware have to change? I'm not so sure," she said. "We'll have to obviously fix it and figure out what that business model is."
"We're not at the forever mouse today, but I'm intrigued by the thought," concludes Faber.
It's a thought that seems unworkably preposterous at first. Yet it's as if the whole software industry has pivoted to subscriptions, so if Logitech can make a case for a forever mouse, they probably will.
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13 Comments
I agree that a subscription mouse is absolutely absurd but their CEO hasn't said anything about subscribing to a mouse. She mentioned the concept of a a quality "forever mouse" and mentioned that it's possible that people would want to pay for software updates to go with their hardware. It's maybe cynical to hear (read about) these two topics in an interview and conflate them. Logitech has never required you to pay for their software and if they had something good enough I imagine they could incrementally increase their revenue.
Their newer Logi Options+ is making it easier to assign multi-step macros to their mice & keyboards. Some of these macros duplicate other things I'm doing with paid software. If Logitech could compete with those other ones and do it better then I'd consider buying from them, too. But that's not a subscription mouse.
Meanwhile, my Logitech MX Vertical is deconstructed on my desk and I'm about to replace the switches myself because they failed after about a year. Apparently, this is a common issue with that mouse. Maybe start with a mouse that lasts 2 years without issues before starting to talk about "forever."