Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices • Hacker News Board

Re: Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices

#151

Post by mrweasel » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 7:28 PM UTC

cududa wrote: post #108

Someone1234 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For now. But if most lenders require this you couldn't have much of an option to say no. They always test things like this with the market most easily exploited. Reminds me of prepaid gas and water meters in the UK. They started out only doing them for those who missed payments or had poor credit, but now they're everywhere. Most new homes get a prepay meter which they can wirelessly disconnect.

Sorry but none of this sounds insidious to me - if you don't pay for something, you don't get to use it.

Normally I would agree, but not when it's basic services. If you could see the damage it does to a family when water/gas/electricity is cut off, simply because they're poor, I don't believe that most people would feel that it's "fair".

Also prepaid plans are somewhere between 150GBP to 200GBP more expensive peer year, which just adds to the cost of being poor.

Re: Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices

#152

Post by jasonlaramburu » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 7:29 PM UTC

fezz wrote: post #53

jimrandomh wrote: post #41

This is neither the first time Google's done something like this to customers, nor the first time Tony Fadell has been directly involved. When they pulled Google Glass from the market, it was concurrent with moving the Glass team to Fadell's leadership. They didn't go quite so far as to push an update to brick devices, but they left the software in a broken state, and refused to open source their fork of Android so u…

They can easily fix this. If they don't, it speaks volumes about how Nest/Google/Alphabets values customer relationships. Take all the other google services and imagine what would happen if google were just as reckless, especially with long life products like home installed devices. Home automation installation services or even contractors would also be cautious about Nest.

Companies sunset SAAS products (with subscription fees, one time setup fees etc) all the time when the cost to support them becomes too high, growth stalls etc. Clearly Alphabet/Nest could have done a better job of customer service and offered users a partial refund or discount on a replacement product. That said, is it realistic to expect a company to support a software service indefinitely (when the business case no longer makes sense), just because it's tied to a piece of physical hardware that you paid $199 for a few years ago?

Re: Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices

#153

Post by narrator » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 7:29 PM UTC

SwellJoe wrote: post #19

I bought a Dropcam when they were a new thing. When I realized they did literally everything via a cloud service and would be a brick without that service, I was furious. The incredible arrogance of a company making a webcam that sends your video to their servers, and provides no means to use the camera in a secure/local fashion, was astonishing to me. I still can't believe something like Dropcam is such a huge succe…

Ironically, I was at a presentation by a Chinese surveillance camera company and they were saying that they are moving their image recognition and processing to the device from the cloud because the bandwidth and centralized processing is not scalable enough. Just as a general engineering matter, the devices will get more smarts.

Re: Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices

#154

Post by Tim61 » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 7:34 PM UTC

yardie wrote: post #10

I'm not against IoT devices but when it requires an external service to work at all I put my foot down. I looked at devices like Nest but decided against it. My Synology NAS has some cloud like services but it does not require any external services to work. Just the way IoT should be.

Exactly. This isn't an IoT problem, it's a cloud-based systems problem. "Cloud" actually just means "someone else's computer", and that somebody will turn off their computer someday.

Re: Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices

#155

Post by mkutsovsky » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 7:37 PM UTC

zeveb wrote: post #56

I think what users actually need is a smart home computer: one device, for the entire family, which provides sits on the Internet and provides secure access to home-network devices (e.g. security cameras, media players) and which gives easier-to-use (albeit perhaps less-secure) access to those things on the LAN. It could use containers to run blobs of code from different vendors. Given modern computing resources, it…

what you are describing is a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudlet which is a machine which sits on the edge and enables spinning up and down of vms for services in an isolated manner

Re: Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices

#156

Post by theandrewbailey » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 7:37 PM UTC

It's time that IoT vendors understand that they are making devices that are a part of homes themselves, and those things have lifecycles of decades, not months. Many people like to not unnail and unscrew everything every 2 years because the manufacturer decided to not maintain them anymore. Whereas the dumb equivalents didn't need that much maintenance to begin with.

How many phones and computers have you replaced in the past 20 years? When was the last time you replaced the outlets you plug them into? IoT has a long way to go to be viable for people like Moms and Dads.

> The fact is that I can fix the problem by purchasing a replacement device such as a Samsung SmartThings hub. It’s not terribly expensive, a few hundred dollars.

Many people will think that is terribly expensive to keep novelty automation happening. And from what I've heard about Samsung's touch screen refrigerators, I bet that it's lifecycle won't be any better.

https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/calendar/Uhfp...

Re: Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices

#157

Post by rconti » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 7:38 PM UTC

jimrandomh wrote: post #41

This is neither the first time Google's done something like this to customers, nor the first time Tony Fadell has been directly involved. When they pulled Google Glass from the market, it was concurrent with moving the Glass team to Fadell's leadership. They didn't go quite so far as to push an update to brick devices, but they left the software in a broken state, and refused to open source their fork of Android so u…

I know almost nothing about the inner workings of Google or the Nest team, and yet I regularly hear about Tony and what a piece of work he is.

If someone like myself, only casually acquainted with the organization, hears so many bad things about Tony, how does he still have a job? Forget his apparent management incompetence, at this point it's just bad PR for Google.

Re: Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices

#158

Post by ars » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 7:40 PM UTC

jasonlaramburu wrote: post #152

fezz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can easily fix this. If they don't, it speaks volumes about how Nest/Google/Alphabets values customer relationships. Take all the other google services and imagine what would happen if google were just as reckless, especially with long life products like home installed devices. Home automation installation services or even contractors would also be cautious about Nest.

Companies sunset SAAS products (with subscription fees, one time setup fees etc) all the time when the cost to support them becomes too high, growth stalls etc. Clearly Alphabet/Nest could have done a better job of customer service and offered users a partial refund or discount on a replacement product. That said, is it realistic to expect a company to support a software service indefinitely (when the business case n…

> when the business case no longer makes sense

Doing this kills ALL future business of this type. Who would buy such a device knowing this could happen?

Unless they don't plan on making consumer appliances anymore.

Re: Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices

#159

Post by brbsix » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 7:45 PM UTC

SwellJoe wrote: post #149

dangoor wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like the complexity of getting around NAT/firewalls is likely to stymie a lot of potential users. Making a cloud service is a bad idea for all kinds of reasons, but it simplifies this important aspect of getting the device up and running.

Yes, that's absolutely an issue. And, it would even be OK, for me, to have that be the default, as long as they provide some other means of dealing with the device. WiFi isn't hard, at all. So give me a local web UI, and a way to store things locally or remotely using some standard protocol. That's dead simple to implement, and routers and printers have been doing it for a couple decades. Simply making the device usa…

There are plenty of cameras like what you're describing on the market today. Modern incarnations of the Panasonic Petcam. Search 'WiFi IP camera'. You just don't hear about them because they aren't hyped to high hell like Dropcam.

Re: Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices

#160

Post by anexprogrammer » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 7:45 PM UTC

jasonlaramburu wrote: post #152

fezz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can easily fix this. If they don't, it speaks volumes about how Nest/Google/Alphabets values customer relationships. Take all the other google services and imagine what would happen if google were just as reckless, especially with long life products like home installed devices. Home automation installation services or even contractors would also be cautious about Nest.

Companies sunset SAAS products (with subscription fees, one time setup fees etc) all the time when the cost to support them becomes too high, growth stalls etc. Clearly Alphabet/Nest could have done a better job of customer service and offered users a partial refund or discount on a replacement product. That said, is it realistic to expect a company to support a software service indefinitely (when the business case n…

Depends how you sunset it. Depends on the reasonable life of the product. In Europe at least Consumer Legislation has an expectation of a reasonable life. It's not reasonable for instance for lots of your fridges to die after only a couple of years. Car makers have to provide spare parts for, I think, six years after the end of production of a model.

I think a lot more could be done to sunset products gracefully, and with consideration for the paying customer. We'll be ceasing updates for this in a year, we'll keep the server active for x years. Be aware there will be no security fixes. Like the phased EoL of Windows releases.

I think quite a few examples of smart things are getting dangerously close to, or already passing, the line that would fit the legal definition of unreasonably short. SaaS only? We need to wait for case law and legislation to catch up I think.

Eighteen months life, then intentionally break your $300 product, with only 6 weeks notice? I think it would make an interesting test case with reasonable chance of success.

I trust Google very little as far as sunsetting their many releases.