A suggestion from Logitech that it could someday sell a mouse that required a subscription to keep working has gone down so badly that the firm is backtracking.
No one's mentioned a Forever Keyboard yet.
As originally reported, it was Logitech CEO Hanneke Faber who said the company was considering this idea. At first, what she said made it sound as if an idea was all that it was -- but then she unfortunately got more specific.
After saying that she'd been told the idea during one of her visits around the company's sites worldwide, she actually described the so-called forever mouse.
"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."
If Faber had just said it was a suggestion by one engineer in that site she was visiting, the forever mouse would probably still have been decried. But by describing an actual prototype, this was no longer Logitech predicting where the industry would go, it was Logitech planning this subscription mouse.
Except it isn't, not according to Nicole Kenyon, Logitech head of communications, whose whole week has probably now been taken up with this.
"There are no plans for a subscription mouse," Kenyon has been telling media firms. "The mouse mentioned is not an actual or planned product but a peek into provocative internal thinking on future possibilities for more sustainable consumer electronics."
Hanneke Faber is reasonably new to Logitech, having taken over as CEO in December 2023. But she has been running global firms and divisions across many industries for three decades.
Unfortunately, the forever mouse is not the first comment she's made as Logitech CEO that the firm has then walked back. She recently said that Logitech's smart home products were "pretty much gone," and this was then strenuously denied.