Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne, says today’s tech companies are shifting power away from consumers, warning people that they no longer own the tools they rely on.
In a new Fox Business interview, Wozniak says that before the internet, people owned the tools and hardware that they bought.
“For the first two decades of personal computers, you bought a product, you owned it, you set it up your way, and it always ran that way, and it solved your problems, and let you make presentations of financial data to your managers. It was yours.”
Now, the Apple co-founder says control is moving away from consumers and toward the tech companies. He also warns that subscription-based models are creating conditions where data ownership is solely in the hands of tech firms.
“Now you have to subscribe to services and pay something per month, and they’ll make changes in how things work, and even your muscle memory of where to tap goes away and changes. They’ll take things away, features that you were using and you can’t count on anything. They’ll even take your data away sometimes, just because you made a mistake and didn’t pay a bill one month or something.
No, I don’t like the business models of today where you don’t own it. You are owned. Whoever the suppliers are, you have to go through them on the cloud, up to the internet, and they own it. So the internet came, and things were beautiful, beautiful looking at first, and they came in all the business models. So I’m not a super fan of when I don’t feel like I own something.”
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