What would happen if the lock on your home stopped working?
How about your car?
A health tracker?
Your baby monitor?
Not because the hardware failed, but because the company you bought it from folded and there was no-one left to pay the AWS (Amazon Web Services) bill.
More and more of the ‘things’ in our lives are reliant on a connection to the cloud and maintenance of software to operate.
As consumers, this adds a level of complexity. Purchasing decisions, at least for anything critical or costly, not only need to account for the variables of quality, price, features, ascetics, trust, branding, etc but confidence that the manufactures business model will carry them through the lifetime of your hardware.