All the wonderful applications and toys that requires an internet service for operation have a very short life. Most application startups don't last two years. That great calendar extension, or small office workflow coordinator, or automatic uploaded video curation you use every day quickly becomes inert. You anxiously wait for their death. The situation for toys is even worse. Almost no toy manufacturer has had to provide service support and maintenance. Once the toy is sold, the only worry a manufacturer had was that of product liability suites. So what are we to expect as we move ever forward into the internet-of-things?
Suppose that Hasbro sells "Psychotherapist Barbie" and she needs to store years of voice recordings and to run complex voice, tone, and sentiment analysis algorithms so as to synthetically voice the appropriate response. How long is Hasbro going to operate this as the number of active customers and maintenance income dwindle?
Hasbro should not run the services. Instead, Hasbro should use the Barbie owner's own Amazon Web Services account to run them on. That is, on behalf of the owner Hasbro will provision the AWS services needed to use Psychotherapist Barbie. Once running, Barbie's owner pays for the services until he or she no longer wants to use the toy. If Barbie's owner prefers Google Cloud Services or Microsoft Azure then Hasbro would provision there instead.
We need manufacturers that sell applications and toys requiring connectivity, storage, and computation for their operation to use the owner's preferred cloud services provider. This is quite easy to do with applications or toys that are used in isolation. For applications or toys that require a network of users then the solution is a little harder as the manufacture would need to implement services that share without centralization and to scale from two users to many, or perhaps millions, of users.
I look forward to the day when I receive my monthly AWS services bill and see listed the applications and toys I use that make my life a little easier and more enjoyable.