The New Revenue Stream
Remember way back before the iPhone or the "I" anything for that matter? Those were the days when we went out and bought a piece of technology and whatever else we needed for it and Boom! we were pretty much done. When we wore it out we went and bought a new one.
Getting a cell phone was a pretty simple proposition. You picked the device and how many minutes you thought you'd need and paid your bill every month. Now you'd be hard pressed to find a phone without features you'll never use but are charged for anyway. Not to mention overage charges for data or unlimited plans that really aren't unlimited either cutting you off or degrading your service over a preset limit.
Everything's a subscription now. Seems like you never stop paying. Services like Netflix started it. Used to be you'd pay a small subscription fee and get your choice of DVD's every month. What made them successful was the elimination of late fees and the highway robbery of the chain video rental stores. Now it's streaming movies at 8 bucks a month to any device that can use the service. Even if you don't use it.
Yes, it's wonderful that you can go to Itunes and just buy the song you like for 99 cents and leave the rest of the selections on the curb . Of course you've bought a lesser quality version of the song for roughly the same price as the same song on CD but hey, it's in your Itunes now, so long as you don't lose your password...
You can even subscribe to Microsoft Office 365 to essentially "rent" the use of office applications. Too bad if you miss that monthly payment and want to open your Word document.
I can go to carbonite.com and back up my computer to the cloud automatically, for a fee of course. That fee goes up if I have more than one computer and/or external device to back up by the way.
Gee, used to be I got a backup program with my operating system or I could get a better one and that was it. I didn't have to subscribe to anything.
Buy an IPAD or an Iphone and you're not likely to have much fun with it unless you visit the app store which generally involves a purchase or subscription depending on what you choose from it. Oh, and don't forget that 2 year contract and/or ridiculous initial cost of the device.
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