Thirty years ago my mother bought me a (now vintage) Faber Castell 52/10 ‘Sharpening Machine’. To the 10 year old me this was a very welcome gift (yeah I’m weird like that) that has adorned all of my desks ever since and helped sharpen hundreds of pencils throughout my life.

My interest in remote working dates from the early 2000s, when I got my first broadband connection at home, or rather at what was my “home“ at the time, Imperial College London’s postgraduate accommodation at Clayponds Village located next to Gunnersbury Park in west London. Clayponds was a very interesting place, with a great atmosphere and facilities. The tenants there were mostly Masters and Ph.D students. Before my time there, people used to get open-ended leases, that is they could stay for as long as they needed to. This wasn’t the case with most other Imperial halls of residence at the time and it stopped being the case when I moved my few belongings to Clayponds in September 2000. For a cash-strapped student from Greece like me, getting a comfortably large room (~20m²) with a view to a leafy park (that doubled as a very old cemetary), for 30% less than you’d need to pay for a much smaller room in a flat with strangers, Clayponds was a great deal. I made some good friends while I stayed there — the last two years of my M.Eng and the first year of my Ph.D.

A few days ago, the European Union decided to hit Google with a €4.3bn fine. The reasons put forward by the European Commission focus on the company’s MADA or Mobile Application Distribution Agreement, that all device manufacturers that want to license Google’s apps and include the Google Play Store with their devices are forced to sign.

MADA has been sporadically discussed by the tech community for a few years now, since the 2014 leaks of several MADA agreements from years past. Here is an article at re/code from 2014. Another article from 2014, by The Information, outlines how Google has been modifying its licensing agreements to include more restrictions for OEMs. The EU has been preparing its case against Google for at least 2 years; here is a 2016 article by The Verge discussing the investigation.

Ever since the 1980s, a vicious cycle of software and hardware requirements and updates has ‘plagued’ users and maintained high and constant rents to the vendors who systematically collude to render their previous offerings obsolete, while forcing (not enticing) their customers to upgrade to the latest incarnation of their products.

The justification for this form of planned obsolescence has — invariably — involved mention of changing standards, APIs, market and technical requirements, certifications and so on. Perfectly good products have time and again been condemned to retirement only because their manufacturer deemed it uneconomical to maintain support for them.

During the late 1990s and early 2010s, the open source community did much to reverse this process, with varying results. Open source drivers, initially developed by individuals and, later, by small companies aiming to attract revenue from disgruntled users that wanted to preserve their investment in hardware devices, proved that the ‘market’ and ‘economics’ arguments were invalid at best (and deeply hypocritical at worst). Some OEMs quickly embraced open source, providing access to their device driver source code; others maintained a binary blob. Others, when their positioning afforded them the option, maintained their limited support policy.

Sadly the allure of SaaS and cloud-based solutions, the gradual conversion of personal computing equipment to ‘appliances’, both through the proliferation of Android and iOS-based devices, through the integration of erstwhile external components (sound cards, networking, I/O interfaces) and the inevitable demotion of activities previously requiring support for device interconnection (printing is an example), has led to the apparent sidelining of this issue, by both consumers and regulators.

There are many major vendors guilty of this. Canon, who limits support to printers and scanners only a few years after they are released. Native Instruments, who ceases to support hardware devices only a mere 5-6 years post release, citing changing APIs in Windows or macOS, even though those devices are extremely simplistic (the Rig Kontrol 2 and 3 are good examples here) and the community might be able to keep providing support for them for years, had the company released the specifications for writing a device driver. Apple and Microsoft itself, the former removing new features when their software runs on older devices, even though said devices were perfectly adequate, the latter requiring the use of a new CPU to run the latest version of Windows 10, again for no good reason.

This type of behaviour, along with vendor lock in, constitutes rent-seeking and is harmful, for all the reasons rent-seeking is harmful, both to the economy, consumers, the environment and competition.

And this is one case where regulators should step in. In the EU the warranty for defects is mandated to be at least 2 years. But there is no mention of support periods for dependent products. Regulators require either longer term support for products sold (explicitly setting minimum terms to the pre-sale specifications put forth by the vendor) or opening up of full, detailed specifications for all parts, components or mechanisms involved in the product(s) involved to the public at no cost for the community (or competitors) to maintain.

As long as the operating framework remains unchanged there is little to no incentive for any vendor to change their ways and start supporting their devices for the long haul.

Ένα από τα μεγάλα προβλήματα στο ελληνικό επιχειρείν είναι αυτό της αξιοπιστίας. Συχνά, κατηγορούμαστε, ως λαός, πως αποφεύγουμε το ρίσκο, πως είμαστε καχύποπτοι και συντηρητικοί στις ενέργειες, τα πλάνα, την γενικότερη δραστηριότητά μας. Και σε έναν μεγάλο βαθμό είναι αλήθεια.

Υπάρχουν όμως και αρκετοί λόγοι που συμβαίνει αυτό: η ελληνική πραγματικότητα είναι γεμάτη από περιπτώσεις που απογοητεύουν και χαρακτηρίζονται από επιπολαιότητα, πλήρη αδιαφορία για την φήμη ή την εμπιστοσύνη που εμπνέει κανείς, περιπτώσεις ‘αρπαχτής’ από τον πιο μικρό επαγγελματία που θα σου πουλήσει ένα ελαττωματικό προϊόν εν γνώσει του και θα αρνηθεί την ευθύνη, μέχρι την μεγάλη επιχείρηση που θα παραβεί βασικούς κανόνες μιας συμφωνίας ή δεν θα πληρώσει για υπηρεσίες και αγαθά που αγόρασε. Δεν είναι όμως όλοι έτσι και μερικές φορές εμφανίζονται εγχειρήματα που επιδεικνύουν καινοτομία και υπόσχονται πρόοδο και αλλαγή, παρά τις αντίξοες συνθήκες. Και σε αυτό το άρθρο θα ήθελα να ασχοληθώ με ένα από αυτά, μια εταιρία που έχει συγκεντρώσει εντελώς αντιφατικές απόψεις γι’αυτήν και που έχει επιτύχει σημαντικά στην αγορά, αλλά παράλληλα, κατά τη γνώμη μου, έχει κάνει και εξακολουθεί να κάνει πολύ σημαντικά λάθη που ίσως της κοστίσουν περισσότερο απ’ότι νομίζει.

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Αν ταξιδέψατε σε κάποιο απο τα ελληνικά νησιά φέτος με ένα 4G smartphone μάλλον θα διαπιστώσατε πως η ταχύτητα μεταφοράς των δεδομένων από και προς τη συσκευή σας ήταν εντυπωσιακά μεγάλη. Στην πραγματικότητα συχνά ξεπερνούσε τα 60Mbps downstream/15Mbps upstream.

Ταχύτητες εντυπωσιακές, ιδιαίτερα όταν λαμβάνει κανείς υπόψη το αρχιπέλαγος των ελληνικών νησιών, τις αποστάσεις, τα όρη κ.ο.κ. Οι επενδύσεις στην αγορά της κινητής τηλεφωνίας την τελευταία δεκαετία, παρά την ολιγοπωλιακή κατάσταση της αγοράς, αποδίδουν καρπούς. Την ίδια στιγμή η κατάσταση των (ενσύρματων) ευρυζωνικών συνδέσεων σε συνδυασμό με τις αστείες διαφημίσεις VDSL του ΟΤΕ, που κατακλύζουν διαδίκτυο – αλλά φαντάζομαι και στα υπόλοιπα μέσα ενημέρωσης που δεν παρακολουθώ – είναι τραγική.

Βασικός λόγος που οι παρεχόμενες υπηρεσίες ευρυζωνικών συνδέσεων στη χώρα μας είναι χαρακτηριστικά κακές, στον πάτο της κατάταξης μεταξύ των χωρών της ΕΕ15 και κάτω του μέσου όρου στην ευρύτερη κατάταξη των ΕΕ28, είναι η έλλειψη ανταγωνισμού. Για τον ίδιο λόγο παρατηρούμε πως οι σύγχρονες ευρυζωνικές συνδέσεις βασισμένες σε οπτικές ίνες, είτε αυτές φτάνουν μέχρι τη καμπίνα/καφάο του παρόχου (FTTC, βλ. VDSL2) είτε μέχρι το σπίτι (FTTB, FTTH), συνδέσεις που παρέχουν δηλαδή τουλάχιστον 30Mbps downstream στους συνδρομητές τους και συχνά αποκαλούνται NGA, ή Συνδέσεις Νέας Γενιάς, στην Ελλάδα είναι ελάχιστες και ιδιαίτερα ακριβές για το ελληνικό πορτοφόλι.
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