"We fucked up, but we don't want to admit it."
Philips reverses decision to close the Hue Platform
151–160 of 166 posts
Re: Philips reverses decision to close the Hue Platform
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not bothering to test and actively support devices from other vendors would be reasonable, but customers have the expectation that a product does a decent effort to respect the standard; whitelisting a subset of Philips lightbulbs and deliberately refusing to work with anything else means giving users a bad product for the sake of anticompetitive business practices. This kind of deliberate, obviously harmful abuse is…
Except I don't think Philips advertised that they are using an open standard. It's just what they used for the implementation. They are free to mutilate that standard as they see fit for their own product, and since they didn't make it into a selling point, there is no reason for them to expect compatibility.
In the world of customers who prefer trustworthy vendors, there's a substantial difference between not wanting to spend money to respect a standard any more than advertised, and deliberately spending money (firmware updates aren't free) to worsen the product and screw customers.
Likewise, "mutilating" a standard to leverage standard technology in a not-really-standard product isn't the same as deliberate artificial incompatibility for purely commercial reasons.
Re: Philips reverses decision to close the Hue Platform
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
The average consumer would blame philips for even allowing the bulbs... people on HN or various other tech circles know better. But do you know who leaves reviews on Amazon and calls their customer support line? The average consumer. And most companies usually pay per call/minute to their customer care contractors.
If by average consumer you are referring to "average purchaser of light bulbs", you are referring to a market that the Philips Hue products are not yet in. The average Philips Hue customer is an early adopter who was willing to spend a large amount of money on a next-generation lighting system. This customer is an early adopter. The question is not whether they should allow third-party bulbs, they already allowed thi…
It's something of a tangent, but Amazon was not legally required to literally go out and delete books off of users' devices - or at least if they were, due to some contract they signed with publishers, that was their own fault. Indeed, after that event Amazon said they would no longer do so.
Re: Philips reverses decision to close the Hue Platform
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're overestimating the technical savvy of most people.
I think you're underestimating the technical savvy of most people. The tech support calls are pretty much a minority of users for a product.
Tech support calls perhaps, but there's more that can damage a brand's reputation than that. I'm not for blocking third party hardware as they originally did, but I understand their position as a company as well.
However since I can't back up my original claim I'll leave it at that.
Re: Philips reverses decision to close the Hue Platform
#155A lot of the people are talking about how important integration and interoperability is. I agree with it, however, a lot of work has to be done to achieve it.
In order to do it properly, there should be standards that major providers agree upon making integration much easier and predictable. That takes plenty of time.
Then you probably need some walled garden to control the experience. Approved apps, approved 3rd party providers, etc. If some crappy app is released, regular users won't blame the developer but the platform, as it was discussed in great details in other threads. We need to get out of the HN bubble. Seriously. We forget that a computer is a device to watch porn and browse facebook and that's about it for A LOT of people. Chances are, it will cause a wave of anger in communities such as this one (where there's a strong sentiment for open systems).
This work has to be done be a number of large providers (read: long processes) and followed by startups popping up and disappearing now and then. This stuff always takes time.
Re: Philips reverses decision to close the Hue Platform
#156Compare this with Ethernet. You plug it in - and it just works. No 3com/Realtek/Intel certification required. As a user I may be shielded, but I believe there are no interoperability issues between Cisco/Juniper/Brocade switchgear either. With this as the background, it's surprising to see a large crowd defending the equivalent of Ford-branded gasoline.
At the ethernet layer sure, but have fun trying to run spanning tree on a mixed Cisco/Juniper/Brocade network.
Switch vendors are also notorious for locking out SFP modules from other manufacturers for no reason, which is particularly annoying because there are so many different types applicable to specific situations (e.g. DWDM) and your switch manufacturer doesn't even necessarily make the ones you need.
(Disclaimer: I've been out of the networking game for 4 years)
Re: Philips reverses decision to close the Hue Platform
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did. I spent a lot of time fixing "computer stuff" for those people. I remember Vista (ironically, I'm probably the only person I know who didn't have a problem with it and, besides the slow file copying, geneally liked it) - but there, in a way, some blame towards MS was justified. They were releasing a next iteration of their operating system to the already mature software market that's built on interoperability.…
It's about time Windows actually stops dragging the concrete boots around (riddiculous backwards compatibility) - it's infuriating how broken stuff in Windows is, and some of the brokeness has been around for YEARS. Just do an XP fork for VM to run all the legacy stuff on and start fixing stuff already, damn!
MSFT would have to provide that. I tried to reinstall XP on one of my Parallels VMs the other month and it failed because the license couldn't be validated. Support has ended, so the Microsoft licensing service no longer allows new installs, even for developers.
Re: Philips reverses decision to close the Hue Platform
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
The average consumer would blame philips for even allowing the bulbs... people on HN or various other tech circles know better. But do you know who leaves reviews on Amazon and calls their customer support line? The average consumer. And most companies usually pay per call/minute to their customer care contractors.
If by average consumer you are referring to "average purchaser of light bulbs", you are referring to a market that the Philips Hue products are not yet in. The average Philips Hue customer is an early adopter who was willing to spend a large amount of money on a next-generation lighting system. This customer is an early adopter. The question is not whether they should allow third-party bulbs, they already allowed thi…
This point can't be overemphasized. People who are installing smart lighting in their homes are probably not idiots who are incapable of reading or understanding a simple compatibility warning. They are not going to blame Dell or Microsoft or Comcast or whoever Grandma calls when something doesn't work. They are well-off technically literate early adopters -- literally the last people in the world that Philips can afford to alienate if they want to be in this business.
Every single comment that conflates Philips Hue users with the average barely-literate technophobe who blames random companies for everything that goes wrong with their computer is completely wrong.
Re: Philips reverses decision to close the Hue Platform
#159Not sure why people are screaming "boycott". Philips never advertised their system as being compatible with third-party lights. The fact that they use an open protocol to communicate with their own lights doesn't change this. It's like connecting to your office chat with an IRC client because you figured out that's what they are using under the hood. Why would you scream bloody murder when one day your IRC client sto…
"Philips Hue is based on ZigBee LightLink, a low-power, safe, and reliable technology to control your lights. New features and improvements are continuously added to the system to make it even more useful. Software and firmware updates can be done wirelessly and directly to your lights. The Philips Hue system can be easily integrated with other ZigBee-based systems for additional home automation."
http://www2.meethue.com/en-gb/about-hue/what-hue-is/
That phrase was up there before the DRM, during the DRM, and now after the DRM. So yes, they were advertising the functionality.
They openly tested and added 3rd party bulbs to be controllable by the system in the past: https://twitter.com/tweethue/status/567368692452048896
They were advertising it and committing open actions to support 3rd party bulbs. The community interpreted their actions as shit rightfully.
Re: Philips reverses decision to close the Hue Platform
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've worked in tech support for many years, and the vast majority of people would blame the PC manufacturer or the operating system for the problems. I spent many years on the Genius Bar (back in the PowerPC and early Intel days) and, in almost, every interaction, the device was to blame - as far as the customer was concerned. In some cases, they were right, in others it was due to outdated software, buggy third-part…
The vast majority of who? If you mean a vast majority of your customers calling into a support center, I'd argue that is a very small amount. I'd venture to say very few of peers in my circles call into support outside of account level tasks.
That's exactly my point, the majority of people who do contact support are just average consumers. If removing third-party bulb support means a better experience for everyone and reduces the burden of support overall (both for users having to contact support and the support load itself), I completely understand their decision.
We tech-savvy people have a better understanding of things like compatibility, the drawbacks of third-party/unofficial accessories etc. But try explaining that to someone who has no interest or experience in this, and they'll just not understand - or care.
If Philips had stuck to their decision, it would've meant that, for anyone contact support, they could handle the entirety of the problem. This avoids the boomeranging of "well it might be your bulb, go speak to the people who made it".
I don't know many people who use home automation, lighting systems like this, but of those that do - all but one is not someone I'd consider tech-savvy.
I have no strong feelings one way or the other about this decision. Honestly, if I ever used this, I'd probably stick to first party products. As I get older, I find that I just don't care or want to spend the time fiddling with compatibility issues. If I'm in the market for automated light bulbs, chances are I'll have no problem stretching my budget to first party bulbs.