There is a downside to subscription pricing for the vendor: they don't get the instant cashflow they're used to. I know Cisco seems to be taking a tactic where only some product lines use subscriptions and the others are on a typical enterprise 3-5 year replacements cycle to provide Cisco with the large cash injections upon upgrade.
Tim > On 30 Jun 2016, at 7:00 AM, Seth Mattinen <se...@rollernet.us> wrote: > >> On 6/29/16 15:33, Eric Kuhnke wrote: >> My biggest issue with Meraki is the fundamentally flawed business model, >> biased in favor of vendor lock in and endlessly recurring payments to the >> equipment vendor rather than the ISP or enterprise end user. >> >> You should not have to pay a yearly subscription fee to keep your in-house >> 802.11(abgn/ac) wifi access points operating. The very idea that the >> equipment you purchased which worked flawlessly on day one will stop >> working not because it's broken, or obsolete, but because your >> *subscription* expired... > > > I'm sure most hardware makers would love to lock in a revenue stream of "keep > me working" subscriptions if they could get away with it. From the company's > perspective what's not to love about that kind of guaranteed revenue? > > I often wonder if Microsoft will someday make Office365 the only way to get > Office, which if you don't maintain a subscription your locally installed > copy of Word will cease to function. > > ~Seth
