Microsoft to Expand Self-Repair Options After 'Productive' Green Group Talks

Microsoft has agreed to expand consumers’ options to repair their own devices by the end of 2022, said As You Sow on Thursday. The green group agreed in exchange to withdraw its shareholder resolution urging the company to liberalize its third-party repair practices, it said. A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed the accord.

According to As You Show, Microsoft will complete a “third-party study” on the “environmental and social impacts associated with increasing consumer access to repair and determine new mechanisms to increase access to repair, including for Surface devices and Xbox consoles.” Microsoft also will expand the availability of “certain parts and repair documentation” outside its authorized repair network, and will “initiate new mechanisms to enable and facilitate local repair options for consumers,” it said.

As You Sow welcomes the accord as "an encouraging step by Microsoft to respond to the upswell of federal and state activity in the right to repair movement,” said Kelly McBee, the green group's waste program coordinator. “This agreement will begin to allow consumers to repair their Microsoft devices outside the limited network of authorized repair shops.”

Microsoft has a "longstanding commitment to environmental sustainability," emailed a company spokesperson. "We also have a longstanding commitment to building high-quality, innovative, and safe devices that customers love. We have been taking steps for years to improve device repairability and to expand the available choices for device repair. As You Sow asked us to investigate the connections between our sustainability commitments and device repairability. It was a productive discussion, and we have agreed to undertake that important study, the results of which will be used to guide our product design and plans for expanding device repair options for our customers."

The accord comes nearly four months after the FTC unanimously approved a policy statement to bolster consumers’ rights to self-repair and access to third-party independent repairs by vowing to crack down on manufacturers whose restrictions are deemed to violate antitrust or consumer protection laws (see 2107210061). An agency spokesperson declined comment Thursday on the As You Sow/Microsoft development.

Right-to-repair advocates greeted the Microsoft news with predictable glee. “It's a terrific development,” emailed Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of the Repair Association. Microsoft “responded to public pressure to make products more repairable in their designs, and assuming they execute on making repair materials broadly available, can really lead the industry in a positive way.” She “didn't see it coming,” she conceded. “But I do read tea leaves and now I think others will follow the example. We'll still need legislation because there will always be companies that need their repair monopolies and we can't rely on benevolent dictatorships to last over time.”