2012

Razer create a totally unnecessary cloud based system

Posted By : Shaun McCran
Related Categories: Cloud, Security

A recent blog post on www.overclock.net sparked my interest in a particularly strange decision from Razer. Razer are a hardware manufacturer that produce gaming peripherals, like Mice and Keyboards.

To use your new Razer device as the amazing multi button, Macro driven gaming peripheral that it was designed as, you have to have an account and a profile with them. Without this account your mouse reverts back to a 2 button standard Microsoft mouse.

To facilitate this account Razer have released a new version of their peripheral profiling software, Synapse 2.0. Synapse 2.0 requires allows you to create an account to store your profile information against, things like settings and device profiles. Users have noticed that this software creates your account in a Cloud space. This has the knock on effect of a user having to be online when they create the account, and being online every time they want to use the device.

Essentially if you aren't online then your account cannot be verified and your settings are not used. Now if I were writing requirements for mouse management software, being cloud based would not be one of them. There is one tenuous reason for a cloud based profile (same mouse used on multiple machines) but other than that the only technical reason I can see for doing this is tracking.

Razer just want to know what you are doing. It's all about usage stats and product tracking. By doing this they now have a profile of exactly which of their devices are in the market, and the numbers of those devices. Couple this with average life of a device and you start to get pretty good sales forecasting, if you can work out how many people will re-purchase one of your products if the existing one fails.

But I can't shake the feeling that this is a really poor use of a Cloud based solution. The user gains nothing from it at all, and is restricted at a fairly fundamental level if they don't agree with it. Personally a software firewall will block this every time for me, and I can't think a decent reason to let it through.

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I had exactly the same thought - the mice are fantastic, best out there IMO: but a 20MB download, followed by an account creation process, to essentially allow me to turn the lights on the mouse off and map non default controls seems a little OTT to be honest.

They could have provided the same thing with a 2MB driver and simple GUI really..

# Posted By Tom K | 21/11/2012 07:15

Cloud based systems are very much popular in market. Every organizations are incorporating these work styles to just like i have tried it to to. These services provide the best protection to the data base. Anyways razor has done the good job.

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# Posted By Sam | 12/05/2015 22:31

I created my own account to play this. But even my mouse reverted back to the older version of microsoft one. What I have to do now? Can I start working on other site like http://write-my-essay-online.blogspot.com/ or stick on to you until a newer version comes?

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Shaun Mccran

Razer create a totally unnecessary cloud based system