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

211–220 of 325 posts

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

#211

Post by mikeash »

cdr wrote: post #52
Bud wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That Phil Schiller quote is, frankly, a pretty lousy attempt at establishing that that is Apple's "view" on planned obsolescence. The swipe at Apple in this context is absurd. I have 15-year-old Apple products that are still working perfectly well. I have a 9-year-old iMac on my desk that is still up 24/7. I have zero (0) Apple products that have been unceremoniously bricked by Apple in the way Google is doing to the…

Google has nothing to do with it. Nest is a subsidiary of Alphabet, and even then the responsibility is 100% with Nest and not Alphabet. Tony Fadell comes from an Apple pedigree, if we're blaming one of the two.

How can Alphabet not have any responsibility if they're the ultimate owners?

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

#212

Post by deelowe »

ilyanep wrote: post #193
deelowe wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to explain (perhaps poorly?) that the change is not simply semantic. No one who is part of Google proper has any say in what nest, glass or those other companies do at this point. None of the culture, support etc... transfers over. The CEOs of these new alphabet companies are free to do as they please. What you're seeing here is this in action. Saying Google are somehow accountable for nest or glass is lik…

They all ultimately answer to Larry Page, presumably.

All of the CEOs? Sure. Sundar manages Google though.

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

#213

Post by mikestew »

magicalist wrote: post #164
mikestew wrote: post #132

I wish Synology would get on the stick and and make/acquire a Dropcam-like device for their NAS products. Why would Synology, a maker of mass storage appliances, head off to the topsy-turvy world of consumer products? Look at their software offerings that run on their hardware. DS Note, an Evernote/OneNote competitor? They have put a non-trivial amount of work to produce it, and it's good enough I use it in lieu of a…

Don't people already do this with Synology NAS boxes? Just a normal IP camera, writing to storage and with remote access set up it should work. Not consumer plug and play, but I swear I've read about people doing this...

Oh, people do it. I was going to do it, but there's a list of hundreds of compatible cameras. Of those hundreds, which ones suit my needs? Which ones are less than $300? What is the definition of "works"? (There's "works, but...", and then there's "works out of the box with five minutes of configuration, and here's a link to the settings you want".)

IOW, yes, there is a currently available solution. What there isn't, AFAICT, is a "click here, wait two days for Amazon, have it running five minutes after you open the box" like Nest or Withings.

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

#214

Post by deelowe »

mikeash wrote: post #207
deelowe wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to explain (perhaps poorly?) that the change is not simply semantic. No one who is part of Google proper has any say in what nest, glass or those other companies do at this point. None of the culture, support etc... transfers over. The CEOs of these new alphabet companies are free to do as they please. What you're seeing here is this in action. Saying Google are somehow accountable for nest or glass is lik…

In this case, being disconnected is a deliberate choice by Google. If that leads to problems, they're still responsible. You can't just take your hands off something and disclaim all responsibility for what happens afterwards.

It was a deliberate choice by the former Google board, who no longer runs Google and now runs Alphabet. The blame lies with Alphabet, not one of it's many subsidiaries.

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

#215

Post by unics »

x0x0 wrote: post #97
maxaf wrote: post #72

As a longtime Dropcam owner, I find this very unsettling. Truth be told, Dropcam service has steadily decreased in quality ever since the Nest acquisition. Not a month passes without an unexplained multi-hour outage; our mobile apps are randomly logged out every few days, requiring us to enter lengthy passwords while nervously wondering what that motion alert might be about. One day the whole Nest rigmarole will beco…

How long, as a practical manner, is google required to run these servers? Until all the devices die? 3 years? 5 years? Don't get me wrong, I'm with you. I think 4 years from sale is reasonable though. Whatever the commitment is, it should be on the packaging, and it would be nice if the various state and federal consumer protection laws were applied here.

If I remember correctly Federal regulations require hardware manufacturers to support their product for 7 years after production end.

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

#216

Post by WalterBright »

click170 wrote: post #177
jasonlaramburu wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, t…

The Turtlebeach Audiotron relied on accessing Turtlebeach's servers to function. They abandoned the Audiotron, and eventually the server, but did provide a patch so you could still use the Audiotron.

I still use the Audiotron every day. Still haven't found anything better.

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

#217

Post by awesomerobot »

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…

Every time I see a new security hardware startup I immediately look for what their products can do without a cloud service.

9/10 the answer is: absolutely nothing. In 2-3 years it'll be in a landfill, not because the hardware is obsolete, but because the firmware made it so. Landfills full of hubris.

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

#218

Post by yuhong »

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.

From https://daringfireball.net/misc/2016/03/the-information-tony... : "Mr. Duffy never got a reply from Mr. Page, but the representative eventually told Mr. Duffy that Mr. Page had considered the offer but declined"

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

#219

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

cdr wrote: post #52
Bud wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That Phil Schiller quote is, frankly, a pretty lousy attempt at establishing that that is Apple's "view" on planned obsolescence. The swipe at Apple in this context is absurd. I have 15-year-old Apple products that are still working perfectly well. I have a 9-year-old iMac on my desk that is still up 24/7. I have zero (0) Apple products that have been unceremoniously bricked by Apple in the way Google is doing to the…

Google has nothing to do with it. Nest is a subsidiary of Alphabet, and even then the responsibility is 100% with Nest and not Alphabet. Tony Fadell comes from an Apple pedigree, if we're blaming one of the two.

Remind me where Alphabet's money comes from.

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

#220

Post by partiallypro »

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.

Google has always had poor customer service, this is nothing new. Most of their (profitable) product lines don't need customer service representation, so they don't care about it.
Post reply on HN