This is true. But the counterpoint is the things you own end up owning you. There's a reason Marie Kondo and the philosophy of minimalism is so popular in this era.
I don't want to have to worry about a thousand DVDs. I don't want to store them. I don't want to keep track of them. I don't want another box to pack up and deal with when moving. I could rip them onto a hard disk. But now I'm managing a virtual inventory instead of a physical inventory. That's an improvement, but it's still a pain in the ass.
Yes Amazon could discontinue its library. No, I'm not worried about it. The chances of a trillion dollar company exiting one of its primary business lines is definitely lower than the chances of me misplacing my DVDs.
There's a reason that services have replaced products to such an extent. Both in consumer and enterprise. And that's because throwing a little bit of extra money at a third party to simplify our already overly messy and disorganized lives is worth the tradeoff.
That being said, I'm sympathetic to Stallman-esque arguments against giving up control. And from an ecosystem level standpoint that's probably bad. But from a purely self-interested standpoint, Amazon is definitely the rational choice. The reality is that services are here to stay, and if we're worried about Stallman-type concerns than we need to build better, freer (as in speech) services.
> Yes Amazon could discontinue its library. No, I'm not worried about it. The chances of a trillion dollar company exiting one of its primary business lines is definitely lower than the chances of me misplacing my DVDs.
Perhaps you should. Amazon isn't likely to discontinue the whole service overnight, but individual videos are another story. See also Netflix, on which most of what was interesting has already disappeared.
> And that's because throwing a little bit of extra money at a third party to simplify our already overly messy and disorganized lives is worth the tradeoff.
I sometimes wonder if that's really true. It definitely is if you have a stable cash flow, and the services aren't really that important. But in general, there are costs of choosing a service over a product you own that are non-obvious, or delayed over time. You can't change, adapt, or improve a service yourself. You can't use it outside of its ToS. A service can raise its prices, or go out of business, or otherwise become useless to you - and there's nothing you can do about it, except hoping that a competitor exists and that there's a migration path.
> I don't want to have to worry about a thousand DVDs
Did you actually buy 1000s of digital movies from Amazon or are you talking about a streaming service (not the same thing)
Paying $10 a month for amazon's movie library streaming access is different than paying $10 per movie for virtual ownership. In one the price is $10 a month. If amazon ends their service I start paying $10 to someone else and pick up where I left off. In the other 1000 movies costs $10k and if amazon ends their service my $10k of virtual ownership is worthless.
It seems to me that the "pets v cattle" argument about servers now also applies to cultural products.
There's so many books and films that you're not supposed to care about them individually. They just make a Content library, and you consume Content. Because more Content is continually produced, you'll never run dry of things to put in front of your eyes.
(I don't like this and think it's bad for culture, as it leads to things like the Disney Vault)
Conversely, that's why I consider exclusive releases prima facie anticompetitive. Cultural products are to a large extent pets, or non-substitutable goods. If you want to watch Game of Thrones, you won't accept the newest Star Wars as a substitute. Exclusive deals essentially destroy competitive pressures that would otherwise apply.
(I'm aware that solving this is not as simple as straight out banning exclusive releases.)
> Yes Amazon could discontinue its library. No, I'm not worried about it. The chances of a trillion dollar company exiting one of its primary business lines is definitely lower than the chances of me misplacing my DVDs.
That’s why I’m super happy with google reader. It means I don’t have to manage my own RSS reader and there’s no chance a multi billion dollar company is going to stop supporting it. /s
Standard oil was always going to be around, and then it wasn’t.
AT&T was always going to be around, and then it was broken apart.
There are literally leading democratic candidates for US president that want to break up big tech companies. In two years you could be looking at Amazon being broken up like AT&T into a bunch of shaky companies that sell to other shady ones or just fold up.
The risk isn’t that amazon ends the line of business, it’s that someday they decide they’d like you to pay again, and once they set their minds on that it’s gonna happen with no recourse for you.
Worse than DVDs are books shelved en masse. I've spent more on storage for various things in my life than I ever have for renting content or products. Ends up dominating your house.
The key is to regularly clean out the shelves. Those books you're never going to re-read, those movies you haven't watched in a decade? Just give them away, to friends/family or thrift stores. Keep your collection at manageable size, only keep the ones that actually mean something to you.
I even do that with my digital music collection, just to make it easier to keep an overview.
I struggle with that. Got so many books that were gifts, many of which I might in-theory read. Feels wrong to offload them. And the shelves are bought and installed now.
We also keep original boxes for things like iPads, cameras, etc in case we ever re-sell the product. Then of course, we never do...
This is true. But the counterpoint is the things you own end up owning you. There's a reason Marie Kondo and the philosophy of minimalism is so popular in this era.
I don't want to have to worry about a thousand DVDs. I don't want to store them. I don't want to keep track of them. I don't want another box to pack up and deal with when moving. I could rip them onto a hard disk. But now I'm managing a virtual inventory instead of a physical inventory. That's an improvement, but it's still a pain in the ass.
Yes Amazon could discontinue its library. No, I'm not worried about it. The chances of a trillion dollar company exiting one of its primary business lines is definitely lower than the chances of me misplacing my DVDs.
There's a reason that services have replaced products to such an extent. Both in consumer and enterprise. And that's because throwing a little bit of extra money at a third party to simplify our already overly messy and disorganized lives is worth the tradeoff.
That being said, I'm sympathetic to Stallman-esque arguments against giving up control. And from an ecosystem level standpoint that's probably bad. But from a purely self-interested standpoint, Amazon is definitely the rational choice. The reality is that services are here to stay, and if we're worried about Stallman-type concerns than we need to build better, freer (as in speech) services.