this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Privacy
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Some companies are trying to bring SaaS to the world of bicycles. It's not going well. Or rather, they're going out of business.
Consumers have choice. Even my non tech friends and family were suspicious of iot bs from the early days of it. something which worked for centuries , was repairable, and could be shared within a community now attempting to be sold at quadruple the price, requiring some bs cloud subscription (with data to be onsold to harvesting probably) and able to be crippled with the flick of a firmware switch on the other side of the world to allow you the privilege of ‘upgrading’ to a better model? nice try venture capital crippled tech bros. Bikes never needed to be sprinkled with silicon valley snake oil. Im sure the founders made their cash and ran, but what a waste of energy and productivity.
Yeah, and it's not just that. It adds unnecessary complexity. All that many parts to break. Bikes already have a problem with too many non-standard components. I had one part break that was simple, but specific to that particular bike. The manufacturer happened to have a few extra around that they sent, but my impression was that (a) there weren't many more and (b) they didn't even know where they had come from. When much of the industry is in that state, we don't need more fancy components.
VanMoof did this. Then their Dutch branch went tits up. Now they have sold shit bikes that won't unlock without their cloud services.
They say they're being bought out and the bikes still work for now, but who knows what'll happen when the new owners think these servers are costing them too much money.
Luckily there's an app out there for VanMoof customers to download their unlock keys and store them safely (in an app on their phone or in plaintext form). Made by a competitor of VanMoof, funnily enough...