Hello, I’m Rob Hirschfeld, CEO, co founder of RackN with a Hot Take from the July 13 DevOps Lunch and Learn conversation about the Right to Repair.
In this episode, we’re discussing how it could be possible for you, the consumer, to take products built and maintained by a company and maintain, change, own, and extend the product’s use past the life of the vendor of that product by getting fixes and repairs that the vendor doesn’t want to offer. Right now, the right to repair is essential from a consumer perspective, yet these rights seem to erode further every day. We are living in a society that doesn’t value the right to repair as a product feature, and we want to ignore that and get things that are easy to use and disposable.
As a consumer and as a company creating products, it makes me wonder if this narrative will switch. What will drive people to decide they want to control and to be able to repair, not just outsource, all of these components, assuming that they can quickly replace the device or patch system or get another service? I think we’ve been overlooking a lot of the complexity that’s building up in the ecosystems we have around these products, but this complexity is also the thing that makes them so hard to repair even if you had the right.
We have a lot to think about!
Please listen to the longer podcast where we talk about these issues and join us at the2030.Cloud.