Siva Vaidhyanathan, the author of the brilliant copyright/tech book The Anarchist in the Library, has a guest-editorial on Engadget today about "tethering" — using technological measures to ensure that all the aftermarket goodies (coffee for your coffee-maker, music for your iPod) come from the same company that sold you the original hardware. It's easy to understand why hardware companies love tethering — it's a license to screw their locked-in customers out of titanic sums of money — but that's exactly why smart customers need to reject tethered products.
So we looked on with enthusiasm at the new pressurized personal coffee makers. They push hot water through a sealed "pod" filled with a precise measure of coffee. It was neat, slick, well-designed, and promised a strong, good, dependable dose. It's the same technology that supplies those surprisingly good coffee available from coin machines in public spaces in Europe.
After a half-hour of debating the pros and cons of such a radical "format shift," we left without one of these cool new machines. We opted out because these specialized "pods" are essentially "tethered" to this brand of coffee maker.
What if we hate the coffee that the company supplies for the maker? What if the company goes out of business? What if they raise the prices of pods? We would no longer order pounds of unpadded coffee from Peet's in Berkeley or run across the street to the deli for an emergency brick of cheap coffee. And my favorite New York coffee supplier, Oren's on Waverly Place, would no longer get my business.
