Philips reverses decision to close the Hue Platform • Hacker News Board

Re: Philips reverses decision to close the Hue Platform

#91

Post by stefs » Wed, Dec 16, 2015, 3:33 PM UTC

fastball wrote: post #63

anc84 wrote: post #32

They can still control it and reverse the reversal in the future. You are at their whim. It is not user-friendly unless it is free software (and hardware). Amazon can still remotely remove books and no one bats an eye. This is just an issue because at the moment these kinds of home automation are per-dominantly "nerd" territory while e-book readers are already mainstream.

Where is this magical place where I can find free hardware?

To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer”.

Re: Philips reverses decision to close the Hue Platform

#92

Post by izacus » Wed, Dec 16, 2015, 3:36 PM UTC

culturestate wrote: post #31

mdip wrote: post #24

A point brought up in the replies to their forum post warrants repeating: They claim that they were concerned about the quality of their brand being eroded by third-party bulbs that didn't reproduce the same quality experience that first-party/certified bulbs did. They had the solution available to them from day one. Since they can clearly identify third-party bulbs, they could have simply presented a warning along t…

I don't think this would accomplish anything vis-a-vis brand protection, since consumers have been conditioned to just click "OK" at every dialog box that doesn't look like it will explode a mine. Six months down the line, nobody would remember the warning -- they'd still get mad at Philips when a third-party bulb breaks.

They could just add a settings option "Enable display of 3rd party lights." Non tech minority is thus protected inside the walled garden from the big bad world out there by default while tech savvy users can still use their technology to full extent.

We really need to stop compromising our tech just because some loud minority refuses to understand how things work.

Re: Philips reverses decision to close the Hue Platform

#93

Post by emp_zealoth » Wed, Dec 16, 2015, 3:37 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #72

golergka wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's like complaining to your PC manufacturer that a program you downloaded doesn't work. Most people would blame the program and look for another one. Have you met "most people"? They would blame PC manufacturer indeed. Just remember Vista and how suddenly all kinds of software stopped working. Surprise: most of the time, this software used undocumented features and sometimes even bugs present in previous Windows…

I did. I spent a lot of time fixing "computer stuff" for those people. I remember Vista (ironically, I'm probably the only person I know who didn't have a problem with it and, besides the slow file copying, geneally liked it) - but there, in a way, some blame towards MS was justified. They were releasing a next iteration of their operating system to the already mature software market that's built on interoperability.…

It's about time Windows actually stops dragging the concrete boots around (riddiculous backwards compatibility) - it's infuriating how broken stuff in Windows is, and some of the brokeness has been around for YEARS.

Just do an XP fork for VM to run all the legacy stuff on and start fixing stuff already, damn!

Re: Philips reverses decision to close the Hue Platform

#94

Post by CydeWeys » Wed, Dec 16, 2015, 3:39 PM UTC

rrrx3 wrote: post #26

rubidium wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either A) You don't trust any large, publically traded company. B) You don't understand how large, publically traded companies work. This decision was made by someone in marketing. Phillips engineers (in this division) were ambivalent because it meant less verification and testing (yea!) but also means they have a less capable product. It got approved because someone (likely a director somewhere) put together a marke…

The decision to only support Philips products came most likely from the engineering division themselves. Marketing probably had a shit-fit because losing a marketable feature is a giant regression to your general user. People in Marketing and Product tend to be way more in-tune with customers and don't make boneheaded decisions like this. Another easy tell: the company was shocked by the reaction of users. That meant…

> The decision to only support Philips products came most likely from the engineering division themselves.

I disagree. I don't see engineers coming up with or getting on-board with such a clearly anti-open-standards decision. Much more likely, what I think happened is that this decision was forced on engineering from above, morale hit all-time lows, there was much grumbling and consternation as they implemented this anti-feature that they clearly didn't believe in, then they rejoiced at the huge public outcry when the change was pushed, and are now celebrating that those assholes up in management had to reverse course with a heavy dose of "I told you so".

Source: I am an engineer at a big company and have seen this scenario play out many times internally.

Re: Philips reverses decision to close the Hue Platform

#95

Post by geon » Wed, Dec 16, 2015, 3:39 PM UTC

jads wrote: post #71

TeMPOraL wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they'd still get mad at Philips when a third-party bulb breaks. Would they? Wouldn't they blame their bulb first? It's like complaining to your PC manufacturer that a program you downloaded doesn't work. Most people would blame the program and look for another one. I'm sure there are some who have it backwards, and they probably will be calling support, but I can't imagine there's enough of them for a company to ac…

I've worked in tech support for many years, and the vast majority of people would blame the PC manufacturer or the operating system for the problems. I spent many years on the Genius Bar (back in the PowerPC and early Intel days) and, in almost, every interaction, the device was to blame - as far as the customer was concerned. In some cases, they were right, in others it was due to outdated software, buggy third-part…

> I spent many years on the Genius Bar (back in the PowerPC and early Intel days) and, in almost, every interaction, the device was to blame - as far as the customer was concerned.

Selection bias. The people coming to the genius bar obviously think there's something wrong with the computer.

Re: Philips reverses decision to close the Hue Platform

#96

Post by DiabloD3 » Wed, Dec 16, 2015, 3:39 PM UTC

jamespo wrote: post #20

DiabloD3 wrote: post #10

The thing is, to me, the fact that they ever decided to do this in the first place means I will never buy Philips smart home products ever. They have proven they can't be trusted with this sort of power, and that is a one way trip. You don't come back from that, you don't get back off my list.

Were you going to buy any of their products in the first place?

Possibly. I've been looking for a small handful of smart home products, and would like to have them all on the same network, now that the Ninja Sphere project is dead.

A ZigBee network seemed like the right idea.

Re: Philips reverses decision to close the Hue Platform

#97

Post by wpietri » Wed, Dec 16, 2015, 3:40 PM UTC

mdip wrote: post #24

A point brought up in the replies to their forum post warrants repeating: They claim that they were concerned about the quality of their brand being eroded by third-party bulbs that didn't reproduce the same quality experience that first-party/certified bulbs did. They had the solution available to them from day one. Since they can clearly identify third-party bulbs, they could have simply presented a warning along t…

That's definitely not a solution.

The Philips Hue line is pretty clearly a premium product. What they're selling is a high-quality experience.

Warning boxes are easily clicked and forgotten. Or if they're clicked by somebody you've hired to install a system, you'll never even know. If people have irregular, unsatisfying experiences, they will associate it with the Philips-branded interface they're clicking on, not the off-brand lightbulbs whose labels are tucked away in ceiling fixtures.

Personally, I congratulate them for starting their system open. The most brand-friendly and wallet-friendly solution they could have chosen was to close it from day 1. But they started open and stayed open until it became a problem for them. Closing it suddenly and cutting people off was a mistake, but a certification program seems like a reasonable outcome.

Re: Philips reverses decision to close the Hue Platform

#98

Post by izacus » Wed, Dec 16, 2015, 3:41 PM UTC

joezydeco wrote: post #13

ohitsdom wrote: post #8

"We underestimated the impact this would have upon the small number of our customers" Do they really believe it is a small number of customers that use non-Philips light bulbs? I mean, good for them in reversing the decision, but the damage is already done (check out Amazon reviews for one) and it should have been easily foreseen.

Translation: "we'll do this to shut up the pro users that are generating all this bad P/R, and it really doesn't matter since 99.9% of our customers won't care about this anyway." Can't say I disagree with the idea. Everyone wants a system like this to be open on principle, but in reality it won't really get used that much. This stuff is still too hard for the average consumer.

And that's FINE - it just confirms that we don't need DRM and walled gardens for these things. If most users will still buy Phillips bulbs and some power users will be able to use other brand then everyone wins.

Re: Philips reverses decision to close the Hue Platform

#99

Post by CydeWeys » Wed, Dec 16, 2015, 3:41 PM UTC

fastball wrote: post #64

HarryHirsch wrote: post #43

Compare this with Ethernet. You plug it in - and it just works. No 3com/Realtek/Intel certification required. As a user I may be shielded, but I believe there are no interoperability issues between Cisco/Juniper/Brocade switchgear either. With this as the background, it's surprising to see a large crowd defending the equivalent of Ford-branded gasoline.

Apples and oranges. Pure hardware is a lot easier to make compatible consistently than hardware+software.

Huh? There's a lot of software involved in wired networking. Way more than for lightbulbs, I'd suspect. And yet they all interoperate via open standards, and any vendor that tried to sell equipment that only worked with their own equipment would be laughed at of the market.

Re: Philips reverses decision to close the Hue Platform

#100

Post by WorldMaker » Wed, Dec 16, 2015, 3:41 PM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #60

TeMPOraL wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A LED bulb converts your 230V AC (or 110V in the US) power source into 12V DC (in case of Hue itself). This converter part can, if poorly made, create a fire hazard. And a bulb is usually mounted inside a lamp, many of which are flammable and have the shape that will accumulate heat inside instead of dissipating it.

Yes, but that applies to china mobile chargers and a lot of other devices that nobody worries about (and also to CFDs and any led lamp that might be today in your house) And of course it's not a software issue

> And of course it's not a software issue

Funny thing though, but that AC/DC converter is manipulated by firmware activated by a wifi protocol. If the fire only starts when the converter is activated into its highest conversion rate in a particular sequence by certain commands sent across that wifi protocol and those commands are being chosen by a user of an app on a mobile device two rooms away, is that a software issue? It's certainly a gray area.