One of the values we have on the show is that a product or service should make one’s life better by purchasing it. What defines a “better” life is up to the individual. But we hope people will consider how bringing a new product or service into their life will impact that life, either before or after purchase. If the company you bought from shuts down after the purchase, or during a subscription, that’s a problem.

I feel sorry for the customers of Insteon, which shuttered its operations last month and made many customers very unhappy. I’m currently not a user of home automation, but I can only imagine how annoying it is for people who have bought into any kind of product or service ecosystem when key parts of it go down, sometimes permanently. And especially if you rely on a system to automate your home! This well-written article at Hackaday explains the whole sorry mess in concise detail. My thoughts after reading it are twofold:

1. Any company can fail or simply drop support for a current product or service, but it’s worse when the product involves servers doing things for you as part of the user experience. The Insteon products and services were not self-contained in a particular standalone device, such as a microwave oven or lawn mower would be. Part of the Insteon value proposition was the product is part of a connected service. No connection, no service.
   
2. The proprietary nature of many products’ engineering and software means that if the entity owning that stuff goes out of business, the ability for anyone to maintain and support the products goes, too. This Insteon situation makes me more interested than ever to support companies that do open source development in their products as part of their business model. It’s not a guarantee that a project would keep going despite a business failing, but it allows for the possibility of a dedicated group of volunteers or a different company to continue supporting and developing a product.

Pine64 is one such company that is doing business in a different way that may help its products be less likely to disappear from customers’ lives. I bought their PineTab tablet and will be publishing a podcast episode about it soon. There are some intriguing things going on at Pine64.