APC was the only UPS company to have their device drivers natively included with Windows 95.
That was before USB was available so they used regular COM port communication, I'm not surprised with that early foothold there was no reason to change and sufficient force to continue ever since.
At the time it seemed like the un-necessarily non-standard RS-232 cable was just to create a "profit center" from the cables themselves, along with the non-standard replacement batteries. They sure would have been a lot quicker to market and had lower up-front engineering costs if they had used standard batteries from the beginning.
It's good to recognize early when excessively high TCO is the primary feature around which a product (or company) is designed. There can be significant PR effort from the beginning to divert any perception of anti-consumer attitude.
Lots of stealth can be involved to muddy the comparison with alternatives which offer normal TCO or well-engineered low-target TCO.
That was before USB was available so they used regular COM port communication, I'm not surprised with that early foothold there was no reason to change and sufficient force to continue ever since.
At the time it seemed like the un-necessarily non-standard RS-232 cable was just to create a "profit center" from the cables themselves, along with the non-standard replacement batteries. They sure would have been a lot quicker to market and had lower up-front engineering costs if they had used standard batteries from the beginning.
It's good to recognize early when excessively high TCO is the primary feature around which a product (or company) is designed. There can be significant PR effort from the beginning to divert any perception of anti-consumer attitude.
Lots of stealth can be involved to muddy the comparison with alternatives which offer normal TCO or well-engineered low-target TCO.