Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

uk.businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 325 posts

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

#171

Post by spinlock »

iamleppert wrote: post #54

This is the ultimate irony in that the only people I know who are obsessed with controlling things like the light bulbs in their home or regimenting the appliances and other devices to a strict schedule to their exacting demands are having the carpet pulled out from under them. Basically, enter your control freak with a penchant for organizing, classifying and making things that worked just fine before "smart" and "i…

Do you have pull cords on all of your lights or switches on the wall? Controlling lights, etc... via IP is a natural progression. Yeah, early adopters are weird but you're crazy if you think this is just a fad for control freaks.

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

#172

Post by JabavuAdams »

ars wrote: post #158
jasonlaramburu wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't like this at all, but I think you've got the calculus wrong. If you truly believe in IoT, then the percentage of future Alphabet customers who will ever hear about this scandal is tiny.s

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

#173

Post by xg15 »

jasonlaramburu wrote: post #162
ars wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm not saying it's an ideal outcome for a company to sunset a product, but why is the consumer expectation so different for pure software vs a connected hardware device (i.e. software + hardware)? Consumers experience sunk cost when any product gets sunset, whether it's hardware or not.

The consumer expectation may be different for web sites (as those were always closer to services than products and so you never "bought" them in the first place).

For traditional desktop software and standalone apps, the expectation is not different at all. I still own a lot of old pc games that I bought at some point and play occasionally and would find it extremely irritating if they suddenly stopped to function without any acceptable reason.

Recently, things may be changing with mandatory auto-updating, subscription models and many apps just being front-ends for server-side processes. But as far as I know, most of those changes are pushed by vendors/developers and accepted by consumers as a necessary evil (if at all). It's not at all that customers would suddenly expect something different.

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

#174

Post by deelowe »

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…

Lot's of people are throwing Google and alphabet in to the same bucket here. Please don't do that. The alphabet companies are free to be ran however they wish and Nest is an extreme example of NOT running a company the Google way. When the alphabet change happened, this became quite clear in just a few months time internally. What you're seeing here is further evidence of that.

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

#175

Post by simoncion »

rconti wrote: post #157
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.

> If someone like myself, only casually acquainted with the organization, hears so many bad things about Tony, how does he still have a job?

Vivek "Vic" Gundotra did serious damage to Google's corporate image and was seriously reviled within Google, yet he stuck around for years. It's possible that Google upper management thinks that Fadell might be able to pull off a bet-the-company move. Gundotra was tasked with the same thing.

Or, it's possible that Google was contractually obligated to keep Gundotra around for a period of time, and is under the same obligation with Fadell. shrug

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

#176

Post by crispyambulance »

ghaff wrote: post #77
SwellJoe wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After the Dropcam fiasco, I wondered if there would be a market for secure smart devices with an open API. To me, it's an obvious benefit and one that I would buy (whereas I won't buy the cloud-based devices of this sort), but I suspect the ease of use of something like Dropcam trumps all of the other considerations. I even considered doing a Kickstarter to build something in that space; the technical side, both hard…

I haven't tried it personally but I know a few people who think highly of SmartThings [1], which is a relatively open platform. I've also experimented with Raspberry Pis. However, to be honest, there are a fairly limited number of "smart" things I can do around my house which would be genuinely useful. [1] http://developer.smartthings.com/

It is a neat platform. I use it myself.

HOWEVER.... it DOES rely upon Smartthings "in the cloud". Every interaction with sensors is mediated through the cloud and if something goes wrong on their side (and it does) mayhem ensues.

FWIW, the developer platform consists of writing groovy scripts in their web-based IDE. The code runs on their servers, not your devices.

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

#177

Post by click170 »

jasonlaramburu wrote: post #162
ars wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm not saying it's an ideal outcome for a company to sunset a product, but why is the consumer expectation so different for pure software vs a connected hardware device (i.e. software + hardware)? Consumers experience sunk cost when any product gets sunset, whether it's hardware or not.

What bugs me is how many companies these days want to include reliance on the cloud for features that don't require it at all, in the interest of gaining access to more customer usage data, but then when they turn the servers off the product becomes useless.

This has become a key thing that I look for when buying new products. If the product relies on the cloud for a feature that I think should be entirely offline, the product will be immediately returned and a negative review will be left on the resellers site.

A perfect example was the early version of the Lockitron device. It required cloud access but had a one time payment. Based on that information alone I could not justify the purchase to myself even just to play with because it's a bad business model.

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

#178

Post by imaginenore »

deelowe wrote: post #174
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…

Lot's of people are throwing Google and alphabet in to the same bucket here. Please don't do that. The alphabet companies are free to be ran however they wish and Nest is an extreme example of NOT running a company the Google way. When the alphabet change happened, this became quite clear in just a few months time internally. What you're seeing here is further evidence of that.

Nobody gives a crap about these semantic games. Nest is owned by Google.

https://nest.com/about/

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

#179

Post by seanp2k2 »

SwellJoe wrote: post #48
mhurron wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 I basically say the same thing about every 'smart home' device. I would love to be able to query my thermostat to find out when and how long it turned the heat/AC on and whatnot, but I only want it to talk to my local wifi and devices. I don't want it to use a cloud servic…

After the Dropcam fiasco, I wondered if there would be a market for secure smart devices with an open API. To me, it's an obvious benefit and one that I would buy (whereas I won't buy the cloud-based devices of this sort), but I suspect the ease of use of something like Dropcam trumps all of the other considerations. I even considered doing a Kickstarter to build something in that space; the technical side, both hard…

Moteino is pretty cool if you want to DIY: http://lowpowerlab.com/moteino/

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

#180

Post by [deleted] »

jedberg wrote: post #36

It's interesting how so many people think this is a new problem because of IoT. This problem has existed for years with games. If you had a game that had to be online to play, and the company decided to stop running the servers, you were screwed. Sure, sometimes people reversed engineered it, and while the company usually didn't care, it was technically illegal. We need some laws to protect consumers, that either say…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN