During a recent episode of The Verge’s Decoder podcast, Logitech CEO Hanneke Faber shed some possible insight into the company’s view on one of its most important products. Saying that “the mouse built this house,” Faber shares the planning behind a Forever Mouse, a premium product that the company hopes will be the last you ever have to buy. There’s also a discussion about a subscription-based service and a deeper focus on AI.
Taking inspiration from nice watches, Logitech thinks that with a premium-enough device, be it a keyboard or mouse, consumers will be less likely to want to replace it.
When asked about the Forever Mouse that she saw, Faber states that “[It] was a little heavier, it had great software and services that you’d constantly update, and it was beautiful.”
But while some consumers might like the idea of a premium mouse that receives constant updates, I doubt many will appreciate the price. Decoder host and The Verge Editor-in-Chief, Nilay Patel, opined that the mouse could cost around $200. Recognizing that it’s a challenging business model, Faber suggested that the software becomes even more important while questioning how to nail down the appropriate service model.
“I am intrigued by a forever mouse or forever video conferencing solution that you just update with software and create a business model around that,” she says.
Another piece of the Forever Mouse puzzle is the software. Logitech uses its Options Plus software which essentially walks people through making prompts to interact with AI. But Faber says this is just the start:
“No, I think we’re at the beginning of AI, and [with time], it will become multimodal and we won’t even need to build prompts because it will know what prompts we need. Things will evolve exactly how they will evolve. Who knows? But I think the human is going to be a limiting factor. Human hands, the human brain. I suspect we’ll still need human-technology interfaces. They may not look exactly like what Logitech sells today, but I think the future for human-technology interfaces is really, really bright.”
For now, details on a Forever Mouse are thin, but you better believe there will be a catch. The Instant Pot was a product so good that customers rarely needed to buy another one. The company went bankrupt.
