101–110 of 303 posts
Are there grounds for a lawsuit when a manufacturer pushes out an update to a product that intentionally degrades its feature set like this? This is no longer the same product that these users bought, it's effectively damaged by the update.
I'll never understand why companies make such customer hostile decisions. I can't see any upside to this and I can't imagine what the discussion looked like when implementing this decision. My (admittedly cynical) guess is that it was one part "We're fielding a lot of support questions on products that aren't ours and our malfunctioning" and two parts "Our customers will be more motivated to buy Philips Hue products…
Boss: We introduced Hue back in 2012 w/ a plan to lose money the first 3 years developing the hub, subsidizing partners, and getting our product out in the market. Tell me we're seeing a positive ROI now. Hue PM: Hue is profitable, but only marginally so. Our strategy of making up the initial investment on $60 per bulb hardware is being undermined by cheap 3rd party lighting fixtures. Plus we're incurring costs respo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hue's hub works both ways, locally Smartphone -> Hub over WiFi (via a shared LAN connection, the Hub isn't it's own WAP), or remotely Smartphone -> Hue.com -> Hub over the internet. The remote mode has profoundly more lag, but also means you can turn on your lights from anywhere. The connection from Hub to the bulbs is always Zigbee. Unless/until Zigbee is built into smartphones this seems like a nearly ideal set up.
Zigbee isn't hard to implement within a Node-Red network. You can use an Arduino-Zigbee bridge to talk on that network, and then control the lights however you wish. In that case, it opens up using all the lights you choose from the cheaper_than_phillips category. I also use Node-red on a Raspberry Pi. It's slim and as small as a base station. I also have Bluetooth, wifi, and nRF24L01+ boards on it, talking all those…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been looking into this but haven't committed to buying anything yet. Insteon doesn't seem well enough documented for third party controller implementations to me, although there are third party controllers available. Z-Wave (distinctively different from Zigbee) are the main contender for me right now. They seem to have the most interoperability but it is still a closed protocol in that documentation isn't freely…
INSTEON documentation is actually somewhat decent. But fragmented. There's some great third party software, there's some great third party hardware. The thing that excited me into building my own INSTEON controller, is that you can directly control a light with about 20 lines of VB .NET code: http://madreporite.com/insteon/plm_basics.html Since I've been so unhappy with home automation software I've found, not doing…
Any help, please? For example, let's say that I want to buy a USB interface (for a controller), a motion sensor, and a light switch (eg. a micro dimmer). I want to plug the USB interface into a modern Linux distribution and speak to it to read motion and the switch and control the light (and configure the switch to operate the light directly without the controller).
Where do I find documentation on:
* What drivers I'll need for the USB interface to get to something I can talk to from userspace, whether this is Free Software, whether I'll need external drivers or not and where I might get these.
* The protocol to speak to the USB interface from userspace.
* The protocol to speak to each of the devices over the interface.
I've spent hours looking, and I only feel that I have half the answers. For example the dimmer is documented at http://www.insteon.com/developer/#devdocs but the motion sensor is not. And I still have no idea about the USB end.
Perhaps the problem is more related to the ZigBee standard, or more specifically, what ZigBee doesn't cover. As I understand it, the fact that Hue products conform to the ZigBee standard only applies to the protocol between the hub and lights; it says nothing about communication between control interfaces and the hub.
With that in mind, I feel that anyone who expected to use the Hue hub for controlling anything other than Hue lights had incorrect expectations. I certainly don't remember seeing Philips advertising any kind of third-party interoperability with the product.
Of course, it would be awesome for consumers if Philips did make that guarantee of interoperability, but from a business standpoint, once you start going down that road, you effectively have to support everyone else's products (whether or not they conform to the spec), and any failing of another product then reflects poorly on Philips' brand - even if they aren't the ones at fault.
So maybe if we put more pressure on these companies to adopt a common home automation control standard (not Apple's, not Google's, but something vendor-neutral), then we might start to see home automation interoperability in a consumer-friendly way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Boss: We introduced Hue back in 2012 w/ a plan to lose money the first 3 years developing the hub, subsidizing partners, and getting our product out in the market. Tell me we're seeing a positive ROI now. Hue PM: Hue is profitable, but only marginally so. Our strategy of making up the initial investment on $60 per bulb hardware is being undermined by cheap 3rd party lighting fixtures. Plus we're incurring costs respo…
That doesn't seem like a fair view of the analysis. If the real value was in the hub, and these other lights were getting a free ride on it, then the opportunity would be to charge more for the hub. What is far more likely to be the case is that the support costs around problems caused by random third party components messing with the Zigbee network were exceeding the value of providing that support, particularly whe…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Boss: We introduced Hue back in 2012 w/ a plan to lose money the first 3 years developing the hub, subsidizing partners, and getting our product out in the market. Tell me we're seeing a positive ROI now. Hue PM: Hue is profitable, but only marginally so. Our strategy of making up the initial investment on $60 per bulb hardware is being undermined by cheap 3rd party lighting fixtures. Plus we're incurring costs respo…
That doesn't seem like a fair view of the analysis. If the real value was in the hub, and these other lights were getting a free ride on it, then the opportunity would be to charge more for the hub. What is far more likely to be the case is that the support costs around problems caused by random third party components messing with the Zigbee network were exceeding the value of providing that support, particularly whe…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing that deters me from ever writing something for iOS is that you have to own a Mac to do it.
I do not believe this is true now given all the third party frameworks available.
I'll never understand why companies make such customer hostile decisions. I can't see any upside to this and I can't imagine what the discussion looked like when implementing this decision. My (admittedly cynical) guess is that it was one part "We're fielding a lot of support questions on products that aren't ours and our malfunctioning" and two parts "Our customers will be more motivated to buy Philips Hue products…
Boss: We introduced Hue back in 2012 w/ a plan to lose money the first 3 years developing the hub, subsidizing partners, and getting our product out in the market. Tell me we're seeing a positive ROI now. Hue PM: Hue is profitable, but only marginally so. Our strategy of making up the initial investment on $60 per bulb hardware is being undermined by cheap 3rd party lighting fixtures. Plus we're incurring costs respo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
DRM is defective by design. I first saw the Hue lightbulbs on SyFy with the 12 Monkeys show. It syncs up lighting to your show. I knew I didn't need that and it would be trouble later on. Now I know the devices lock out third party bulbs.
Let's start redefining DRM as what it truly is: Digital *Restrictions* Management