Keurig CEO Sort Of (But Not Really) Apologizes For Company's Ridiculous Foray Into Obnoxious Coffee DRM
from the We're-sorry-for-being-a-little-too-innovative dept
You'll recall how last year, Keurig Green Mountain created a surprising, negative public relations tsunami with the news it would be using a form of "coffee DRM" in its latest Keurig 2.0 coffee maker. The new technology basically prevented anyone from being able to use refill pods from competitors, or any of the more environmentally-friendly, more cost-effective refillable pods available online. Company CEO Brian Kelley and Keurig's marketing department then made matters dramatically worse when they tried to claim the ham-fisted market lockdown was "critical for performance and safety reasons."The story got notably more amusing when "hackers" started defeating the company's DRM measures with rather low-brow hacks consisting of pieces of Scotch tape. Competitors similarly began either developing pods that quickly defeated the embedded technology, or gave away plastic clips that confused the system into accepting competitors' pods. In short, what Keurig thought was a clever way to lock down a market and make extra money, wound up making the company look like a tone-deaf, anti-competitive, mechanical dinosaur powered by over-caffeinated nitwits.
A little more than a year after the embarrassing saga began, Keurig appears to finally be beginning a not-entirely graceful about-face on the matter. After the company's stock took a notable nose dive and sales of brewers and accessories dropped 23% last quarter, Kelley claims he's now seen the error of his ways. Sort of.
Reading the actual transcript of Keurig's latest earnings call, Kelley still can't help but minimize the backlash as the concerns of a "small percentage" of "passionate" users. Meanwhile, while Keurig focuses heavily on the fact it was wrong for pulling the company's own, reusable "My K Cup" from the market, the fact Keurig tried to bulldoze its way to market domination via obnoxious, heavy-handed DRM is, as you might expect, downplayed dramatically:
"I would tell you the other thing we heard loud and clear from the consumer while very small percent of consumers, a very vocal and intense, passionate consumer who really wanted the my K-cup back, what we learned that it’s important the message and the signal that it sends, the ethos that it sends is that we want consumers to be able to brew every brand, any brand of coffee in their machine and bringing the my K-cup back allows that.So yes, while it's great to hear the company admit it was "wrong," Kelley only admits to being wrong for pulling Keurig's own reusable pod from the market, not necessarily for trying to block all competing products -- or for spending a year trying to argue that the ridiculous foray into DRM was necessary for the safety and security of Keurig's products. Meanwhile it's still apparently going to take Keurig until Christmas to re-introduce its own, refillable pod, and, contrary to media coverage, there's no clear statement here that the company's planning to back away from coffee DRM entirely. Still, it's at least a partial victory, and Keurig's sort-of-mea-culpa is the perfect way to belatedly celebrate this week's International Day Against DRM.
...My K-cup wasn’t going to work with a new system as the new system had to identify the pod versus a carafe, so we took the My K-cup away and quite honestly we’re wrong. We missed, we didn’t – we underestimated, it’s the easiest way to say, we underestimated the passion that consumer had for this. And when we did it, and we realized it, we’re bringing it back because it was we missed it. We shouldn’t have taken it away, we did. We are bringing it back.
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Filed Under: brian kelley, coffee, coffee drm, drm, keurig
Companies: green mountain roasters, keurig
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That was my reaction too
The emphasis on the "My K-cup" was one indication. The other (more important) indication was that he thought the problem was that Keurig didn't "educate" customers that they have a very wide variety of different brands of coffee available in K-cup form.
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Re: That was my reaction too
Not that it much matters, Keurig is dead to me at this point. Let that be a lesson to the rest of you.
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Side note
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I haven't heard of any of the competitors' pods exploding when used in a Keurig machine after bypassing the DRM or heard of any lawsuits relating to the issue either. If this happened in testing, it seems like it would have happened to a bunch of consumers and gotten press about it. Heck, Keurig would have put out a bunch of press releases about any published incidents as a defense of their DRM if they were widespread.
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I'm an engineer. That's not how engineers generally think.
They're much more likely to advocate a big day-glo sticker that says "WARNING: Off-brand cups may explode and scald you!" as a temporary measure until they re-design the thing to contain the scalding spray.
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And I assure you, I am not a Keurig shill, I don't own one, I think they're a complete waste of money. I don't care if you believe me, I just wanted to pass along what I was told by a person who actually works there since everything else we're reading is guesswork by people who may or may not be customers.
If I were going to shill for any coffee maker, it'd be my AeroPress.
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Me too. Easily the best coffeemaking solution I've ever used, and I'm pretty sure that I've used them all. :)
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That sounds incredibly bizarre to me. The overwhelming majority of engineers I've worked with over the decades would have rejected that solution as being both ineffective and hostile to the customers.
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If that actually happened a few times to consumers I'd bet the government would step in and order a recall. Other products have been taken off the shelf before it got to that point when the manufacturer learned of an issue before anybody got hurt. This product hitting the shelf with the stated issue doesn't put Keurig in a good light, even if it didn't have DRM.
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Keurig can apologize all it wants, the actions speak louder than it's words. Here's a clue for them. Coffee brewing is not limited to their product and their product alone.
I will buy the product I wish and brew coffee how I damn well please. All this move did was ensure I will never buy anything from Keurig.
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You try being dispassionate when you are drinking a hundred times the coffee of an average customer.
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What is this "Keurig" you speak of?
You mean the company whose products I told my family and friends (and even some enemies) to avoid like the plague.
You mean the company that I will NEVER purchase from again.
That Keurig. Got it.
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If that was an actual concern of the engineers, the trivial solution is to make certain that the pod containment was sufficient to avoid the problem.
This has the smell of PR BS. And the CEO's statement sounds like "I'm sorry.. that I got caught."
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Best sentence of the year in Tech Dirt
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Exploding??
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Lets pretend to be sorry, and when we sell a fuckload of coffee makers, we'll try going back to the DRM shit...
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You can tell by the way he's stammering that he really wanted to say, "We counted on them being stupid."
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More issues
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Ah, delicious tears.
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