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I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

androidauthority.com

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Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#31

Post by goosedragons »

Corrado wrote: post #2

I feel like this is just one more thing that Google leadership is failing at. I have some similar examples to the ones in the article. I recommended that my brother-in-law get a Google wifi AP some years ago. Recently, I got an email from Google saying that they are no longer supporting it and after a certain date you will no longer be able to make changes to it. WTF?!? My Apple Airport Extreme is older than the Goog…

TBF Airport Extremes stopped getting updates years ago. The last update was 7.9.1 from 2019. Granted you can still change settings and not being able to do that after discontinuation is pretty inexcusable.

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#32

Post by blitzar »

bruce343434 wrote: post #10

Investing? To me it implies stocks. You are not investing in anything, you are consuming goods and services. When people buy loads of crap and call it "investing in a [good] ..." is that some sort of coping mechanism? No, you don't own boot futures. You bought some boots and you wear them.

The Latin verb investire meant “to clothe” or “to surround” (the prefix in- + vestīre meant “to dress,” “to clothe”; the etymology of invest literally means “in clothes”).

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#33

Post by c4mpute »

cromka wrote: post #12

It is only a matter of time before a class action is filed against Google for reducing the functionality of products they previously sold. The Assistant in Mini speakers I use at home has become amusingly bad: not that it doesn’t understand what I want, but it will often just not execute my orders, despite understanding. For example, it recently ignores my “yes” to its “do you want to know more?” follow up questions.…

I think for a lawsuit to happen there would need to be some interested law firm to organize things. For them to be interested, there would need to be money in it, that means payout times number of participants. However, since nobody except a few buys google's home automation, the number of participants is too low to result in a relevant size.

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#34

Post by csydas »

bruce343434 wrote: post #10

Investing? To me it implies stocks. You are not investing in anything, you are consuming goods and services. When people buy loads of crap and call it "investing in a [good] ..." is that some sort of coping mechanism? No, you don't own boot futures. You bought some boots and you wear them.

I don't think such a semantic argument is necessary; invest just means you're committing resources to get benefits, it's not purely a financial arrangement.

I'm positive in your work you think in terms of resource investments and payoffs to better understand whether a project is worth continuing with, and that's exactly what the article means.

A smart home system is definitely an investment in my mind, and the payoff is a more comfortable and easier life. That is all the article is saying; the financial, time, and mental resources are no longer going to be invested into Google smart home products as the investment does not return the desired benefits and even leaves you with a net-negative.

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#36

Post by Nursie »

I gave up on Google’s stuff when Nest decided they were no longer going to function with google domain accounts. It had been fine for years, then there was an interruption in my subscription for some reason and I couldn’t re-subscribe.

After multiple opaque “Sorry, not working, maybe try later messages, eventually it became clear from support forums that someone at Nest had decided that google managed domains == company email, and we aren’t going to support that because your boss might watch the feeds. Never mind if you’re using it at a company. Never mind if you’re using your domain for a family (as they used to recommend was a great use for “Google for Domains”!).

Any time they were challenges they just doubled down.

Ok bye then…

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#37

Post by c4mpute »

gondaloof wrote: post #18
ilayn wrote: post #6

If only the author knew to what level Home Assistant reached, they would not even bother with google or alexa.

What can HA do that Google/Alexa can’t?

Break even faster. Upgrading HA is a chore, it frequently breaks, ceases to understand its own configuration, drops integrations.

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#38

Post by isoprophlex »

gondaloof wrote: post #18
ilayn wrote: post #6

If only the author knew to what level Home Assistant reached, they would not even bother with google or alexa.

What can HA do that Google/Alexa can’t?

Not milk it's users for every iota of personal information for one, and of course actual customization and almost infinite hackability if you are so inclined

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#39

Post by wakeupcall »

gondaloof wrote: post #22
b112 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the funny thing is that google could use brand awareness to engender trust. When I buy some new fangled toy, I often look for a trusted name, instead of something made overseas, with an incomprehensible name. But it is almost the opposite. Fly by night names and resellers on amazon, are more stable than google. Some even have far better support! Just bizarre. Someone should tell google that outside of SV, peop…

> But it is almost the opposite It feels like I only hear this on tech forums. Everyone outside trusts Google and that’s kind of the issue

It's going to take a while before the general public realizes this.

You need to see multiple failures before you can move the needle on a giant. This is especially true of a popular brand which is seen on android phones everywhere and it's essentially intangible (one example: you buy an asus phone, you still see "with google", but you don't associate poor sw with google: people still blame asus).

It's also much slower for physical products.

If you don't buy new cars but go for the 10y low-mileage ones, you'll be about to start experiencing extremely shitty car infotainment systems where every system cloud feature is useless because the api endpoint is already broken.

For houses and appliances it's even longer.

The problem is those past products and broken cloud features will haunt companies even if they corrected themselves for newer ones. You can't get rid of those as fast as you drop cloud services and make people forget. Google (and others) will learn this the hard way, in the long term.

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#40

Post by kweingar »

c4mpute wrote: post #37
gondaloof wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What can HA do that Google/Alexa can’t?

Break even faster. Upgrading HA is a chore, it frequently breaks, ceases to understand its own configuration, drops integrations.

Not sure why this was downvoted. This has been my experience. It’s quite high maintenance.
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