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

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

#241

Post by ocdtrekkie »

burtmacklin wrote: post #237
spoinkaroo wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What have you heard about Pichai?

Curious about this too... most "tech industry" news I've read of him is full of fawning admiration.

Google is incredibly good at their "PR releases disguised as interviews". Google senior employee puff pieces are pretty amazing. While such interviews aren't "paid" persay, you only get such interviews (and the clicks/ad-views they bring) if you portray those people in a positive light.

Though if you scrape them for minor bits, you find some minor hints. For example, one of those fawning admiration posts about him, two years ago, mentioned that he killed the Android laptop project, because it was competing with his own project, Chromebooks.

I recently heard the 'tack Android apps onto Chrome OS' strategy described as a "trainwreck" by a Google employee, and that ship has now been righted: Android is working on multi-window views in Android 6.x, and it's looking like Android is once again looking at a single converged OS for multiple form factors.

Ubuntu and Windows, of course, have been working on this for a while. Had Pichai not interfered out of his own ego for his own pet project, Google would be leading this curve, not trailing behind. As another commenter said above, "There is a lag between management incompetence and revenue". But Android was leading this until Pichai got in the way.

Between a huge stumble like this, that the media barely even noticed, and the fact that under Pichai, Google has lost almost all consumer trust, I have a hard time believing Sundar doesn't deserve a large helping of the blame.

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

#242

Post by vorg »

crispyambulance wrote: post #176
ghaff wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not just Smartthings which betray users by collecting all your data. If you need documentation help with writing those Apache Groovy scripts, you might think going to the Apache website to look up Groovy would provide a safe browsing experience. But virtually every link there for Groovy redirects to groovy-lang.org. Look up the DNS name registry and you'll see your IP address isn't being collected by Apache, or even a business -- that domain name is owned by a single private individual without any business or non-profit affiliation. When it comes to business ethics, like attracts like.

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

#243

Post by unclebucknasty »

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…

Fitbit. I fail to see why tracking my health, location, etc. is a cloud function, beyond selling my data. At least give me the watch free if you're going to sell my data too.

They then add insult to injury by making me sync via a dongle /connected cable to my laptop; at which point I could just as easily sync to a desktop client vs their otherwise "disconnected cloud".

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

#245

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#246

Post by dgacmu »

mrexroad wrote: post #61
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…

counter point: i pre-ordered dropcam for the reason that it was limited to cloud-use only. I wanted something dead simple to use so my wife / house sitter / etc could easily move it as needed, we had access anywhere without configuration, and devops/it being handled by someone else incase i'm not around. Classifying their cloud-only product design decision as "incredible arrogance" quite a stretch... if anything, sou…

I did the same. I'm dubious that I'll buy another one, but even with the lack of new shinies, I'm happy with my dropcam purchase. If it shuts down tomorrow with no story for how I can switch it to my own servers, I'll be less happy. But I used it to replace a homebrew setup with a cheap IP cam and my own storage -- I willingly went with the cloud route knowing that it could be shut down on me, and the ~two years of completely hassle-free operation has been worth it. The homebrew version was mine, all mine, and it was a bloody headache.

I'd strongly prefer to buy from a company that promised open sourcing / releasing access keys if they sunset the product. In fact, I'll probably look for that on future purchases...

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

#247

Post by sokoloff »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #232
click170 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These shenanigans by Google and the numerous reports of the problems with Nest and their smoke detectors have basically guaranteed I don't include Google devices in my home automation setup. I would rather manually muck around with a raspberry pi and some random sensors bought online than rely on a Google product at this point. There's a lot of room for a vendor to come in with open products, a pledge to maintain tha…

Yeah, unfortunately, there's a huge middle ground not being tackled. I use INSTEON devices, which are proprietary, but can only interface outside through my PC's serial adapter (or a cloud hub, which I obviously didn't buy). I want consumer-quality switches and such in my house, so this was the obvious choice. But then the open source hardware stuff is almost entirely limited to 'build it yourself' boards. And sure,…

I have ALC (On-Q/Legrand) switches for the same reason. Hard-wired control, but reasonably nice (at least not clown) looking and operating switches in manual mode.

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

#248

Post by SEJeff »

JshWright wrote: post #210
hatsix wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... are there any hubs that specifically work with home-assistant? I like the idea of home-assistant, but I've already got a ton of z-wave already in my house.

I am in the very early stages of home automation. I've had a Nest for years, but only last week I installed a Z Wave dimmer (one of the Cooper Aspire series) and set up Home Assistant with with Aeon Labs Gen5 Z Wave dongle[1]. I've been very impressed with Home Assistant. The developer is very active, and happy to discuss development proposals in the project gitter.im chat room. [1]: http://www.amazon.com/Aeon-Labs-A…

Yup, balloob is about as nice as it gets for an open source maintainer. He is why I started trying to contribute to Home Assistant (that and it is actually overall very good python code and how an OSS project should be organized).

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

#249

Post by Gustomaximus »

fludlight wrote: post #165
rconti wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> how does he still have a job There is a lag between management incompetence and revenue.

Often these people are very personable when they want to be. They use this trait to manage up but only those below them, and without the power to make changes, see the real person. This is why and exectutive team needs to be themself spending time at the working level or have eyes/ears there.

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

#250

Post by Gustomaximus »

fludlight wrote: post #165
rconti wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> how does he still have a job There is a lag between management incompetence and revenue.

Often these people are very personable when they want to be. They use this trait to manage up but only those below them, and without the power to make changes, see the real person. This is why and exectutive team needs to be themself spending time at the working level or have eyes/ears there.
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