Month: June 2025

Did you forget the password to your toothbrush again?

This is a real thing. And it’s funny because it’s both ridiculous and true, right? Because software is eating the world and user accounts are everywhere.

But why is software eating the world? It’s because, in many cases, it really does make things better. Your connected doorbell can show you who’s at the door. Your connected car can tell you where it’s parked. Your connected toothbrush can tell you… okay, I’m not sure about that one, I confess. But somebody thinks it’s cool.

The downside, of course, is now you have to worry about privacy, passwords, and security. For your freaking toothbrush. Some things get better, some get worse. Why not just opt out? Maybe you think the benefits aren’t worth the hassle. Go ahead: try to fight back. Buy yourself a wooden toothbrush with boar-hair bristles. But I’m here to tell you this is an unstoppable trend. The software tsunami is just getting started. Connected software is going into everything, and with it come user accounts, passwords, and subscription fees. In the future, you will subscribe to everything.

Why is that? Once something has software that is connected to the world, you have to worry about security, and security is an expensive, never-ending game. You’re going to need a steady flow of security updates for all of your connected devices. And that means people need to be paid to keep providing those updates. And THAT means you’ll be incurring costs with your doorbell vendor for years after you buy the thing. And THAT means you’ll be paying for a subscription.

Think of it from the vendor’s point of view. If you sell me a doughnut, you take my money and you’re done with that doughnut forever. But if you sell me a battery-powered wifi-connected doughnut with a GoNutz4Donutz iOS app, then I’m going to expect you give me bug fixes, updates, and security patches forever. It won’t be cheap and it won’t stop. That doughnut sale will haunt you for years.

The world of the future will be a world of services, not products. You will throw away hardware on a schedule determined by software, not by hardware. I had to trash my first-generation Sonos speaker, not because the hardware had aged out, but because Sonos refused to support the software anymore. I didn’t get a choice. One day they turned my speakers into bricks. Soon enough, this is going to be the fate of your car. The engine will be fine. But a software engineer somewhere far away will change a setting and your car will never work again.

I have decided that it’s best to think about all these clever, needy, infectable devices as animals. Your devices are alive.

It calls to mind an image from the Flintstones, where all the appliances were animals of one kind or another. The phonograph was a bird. The lawnmower was a grazing herbivore. Without care and feeding, they will die. Or worse. They might attack you, courtesy of some North Korean malware.

The world is getting better. The world is getting worse. On balance, I think it’s probably getting better. But take my word for it: in the future, you will subscribe to everything.