Nvidia outlines subscription-fueled journey to $1tr revenue Nvidia has laid out its roadmap, of sorts, to a trillion dollars in revenue. That sales projection has no timeline, and is ambitious considering the revenue from the most recent financial year was just $26.9bn, up 61 percent annually. The GPU giant's GTC event this week indicated its path at least involves extracting repeat …
= wont buy that hardware ever again.
Examples:
Car needs subscription to do X = don't buy that car.
Feature on my PC needs a subscription to continue doing X* = dont get feature than needs that subscription
etc
Maybe I'm oldskool, but when I buy something I want to buy it and that's it.
* Not comparing this to a software subscription service that provides continual updates, but that's a different conversation
When these companies get too greedy, pirates will offer cut price subscriptions at a fraction of the cost (to them) compared with the real thing. This is what happened to Sky/Virgin TV through card sharing servers providing all channels and PPV events at half the cost of the most basic subscription price per month. Given the processing for self-driving will have to occur locally, a few replacement chips to accept modified code would likely do the trick!
You can also guarantee that aftermarket pluggable AI will become a thing, as there is no way the EU or the US will want to risk a cartel setting the prices like what has happened to every other major aaS product.
Whilst I completely agree with this sentiment, unfortunately those of us with this view are very much in the minority. Buying products and services on subscription or some sort of monthly lease is the way the world is going.
It is perceived to be cheaper...
The end user likes it because:
They see a low monthly payment.
They have a nice new toy every few years or constantly upgraded software.
The providers and retailers like it because:
Reliable revenue stream
More opportunities to increase revenue
Ability to upsell
Increased margin
All that subscription sauce we are being served in the IT-hardware world at this moment is it a sign these OEM's are at a plateau of growing their customer pool and so the cost allocation is getting higher and higher ? Or are we getting to a technical plateau of the hardware (lithography, power, platform architecture, soft integration, …) ?
Or is the actual stuff just good enough for the foreseeable future and the new stuff is getting just too expensive to develop, produce for a shrinking customer pool who needs it and are willing to buy it because all heavy applications/work you just do it on a rented cloud service ... ?
“Special offer this month! Pay £15 each per month to get hardware acceleration on the Red and Green channels, and we’ll allow you to combine that with your existing ‘Basic Blue’ complementary rendering for free!* Experience hardware acceleration in full colour!”
*terms and conditions apply. Combined RGB acceleration may only be used until Jan 1, 2023 or launch of next generation GPU, whichever is sooner. Not valid in Hawaii, Alaska or Stoke-on-Trent.
Try the new NVidia RTX 5090 Ti, now free for the first 30 days.*
* Credit card, valid email, and active mobile number required. After the first 30 days, a one-time payment of $499.99 will be processed and you will automatically be enrolled in the NVidia PLAY! program for $34.99 per month. DLSS, PhysX, and NV encoder are additional monthly fee each. By enrolling in the NVidia PLAY! program, you agree to allow NVidia to collect usage telemetry and insert relevant advertising into the game. Failure to pay will limit the video card to 20 FPS in all applications, including the operating system.
Yes, They encrypt your data and it costs you an arm and both legs to unlock it.
Gives a new slant on 'ransomware'...
Nvidia is going to shoot itself in the foot big time if AMD comes up with a performant Graphics card without the subscription.
Eat this Nviria execs... -->
While this would be true, the article suggests it's not the distributed gaming cards that will have software services added.
The cards are already priced well above the $100/year revenue mark; Nvidia are looking at how to achieve that through provision of software services to people that didn't buy cards.
Of course, it's a slippery slope so I am nonetheless glad that AMD (and the newer entrants in the market) are there to keep them honest. Cynically though the moment one of them makes that switch the others will see the added revenue and join them - they don't even need to collude.
>The cards are already priced well above the $100/year revenue mark; Nvidia are looking at how to achieve that through provision of software services to people that didn't buy cards.
More likely they want to leverage their base of installed cards, making them essential to access future cloud services. By developing or convincing others to develop such services Nvidia can achieve higher profit margins for both.
Essentially trying to copy Apple's business model.
This all sounds like a company deranged by greed, basing the company's future on a vision of a world of worthless bullshit that only a small percentage of real people would be willing to spend their real money on. For sure, their CAD stuff could well be a great earner, but only if put to use designing real world things, rather than worthless NFTs in 3D Virtual Happy Stupid Land.
Howard Sway wrote: "only if put to use designing real world things, rather than worthless NFTs in 3D Virtual Happy Stupid Land"
From the article: "a per seat software subscription for professional designers and creators, which we estimate at 45 million"
Since 45 million is about one out of five Instagram users worldwide, their idea of professional almost certainly means designers of Happy Stupid Land.
So here we have Nvidia saying that car manufacturers will pay Nvidia a small(er) upfront amount for kit that can be upgraded over the air when the car owner decides they do want some additional feature after all, and they'll take a cut of that upgrade.
And on the other hand we have Uber, Waymo and others saying that the driverless taxi is the future and that no one will own their own car any more.
(Invest in both companies and be sure to be disappointed!)
The breakage will occur because they're all at it. Stellantis projects it will get about 20 billion Euros in revenue from software subscriptions by 2030 and they're actually a car manufacturer. (Its products include Fiat/Chrysler, Citroen, Jeep and a whole bunch of other marques -- look them up.)
So you've got everyone and their dog after a revenue stream from drivers, along with government (taxes), government (tolls and other charges) and parking owners/revenue collectors. At some point this juicy orange will become a rock. (The initial response will be to make subscription based features mandatory 'for safety/environment reasons' since legislators are at bargain basement prices these days.)
The only way I can see them getting to their trillion dollars target is by the Fed printing dollars so fast that you'll need a few thousand to do your weekly grocery shopping.
I want that!
And I expect to pay thousands each year for updates to make it less defective. Lawyers will eat this stuff up as the body count of pedestrians rises. Next they will want automatic self-tinting glass which will stay too dark to drive unless you re-up your subscription.
This is THE reason why I'll never buy a Tesla.
I'm all on board for electric vehicles, I've owned hybrids since 2005. Now I have a plug-in. Because of this bullshit Tesla is a non-starter as far as I'm concerned.
NEVER do SAAS. I'll be a dirt farmer before I do subscriptions.
Ahem. Rolls Royce has been charging airlines by the hour for jet engine use for maybe a decade now....
Whats the venn diagram of people on this forum who say they wont rent hardware and people with a disney+/netflix/prime/sky+ subscription ?
And is the overlap known as the hypocrisection ?
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