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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday December 17 2015, @05:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the beating-back-corporate-giants dept.

Philips has backed down over its plan to keep out third-party bulbs from its Hue smart lighting system:

Dutch electronics giant Philips has been forced into an embarrassing U-turn over its plans to lock out third-party suppliers of light bulbs for its Hue smart lighting system. [...] Philips' customers have staged a very noisy protest at the move and the firm has backed down. In a statement on the Hue Facebook page, Philips gave a somewhat ungracious explanation about why it had reversed its earlier decision.

"We recently upgraded the software for Philips Hue to ensure the best seamless connected lighting experience for our customers. This change was made in good faith," Philips said. "However, we under-estimated the impact this would have on a small number of customers who use lights from other brands which could not be controlled by the Philips Hue software. In view of the sentiment expressed by our customers, we have decided to reverse the software upgrade so that lights from other brands continue to work as they did before with the Philips Hue system."

Previously: Lightbulb DRM: Philips Locks Purchasers Out Of 3rd-Party Bulbs With Firmware Update


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @05:16PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @05:16PM (#277768)

    I don't see why this is ungracious. They aren't compelled to make sure their new code releases are backwards-compatible with non-Philips bulbs. It would be a dick move to purposefully break backwards-compatibility a la Microsoft Office products, but it is only for PR reasons to go out of their way to ensure they don't break backwards-compatibility with non-Philips (or even with their own bulbs, for that matter).

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Gravis on Thursday December 17 2015, @05:26PM

    by Gravis (4596) on Thursday December 17 2015, @05:26PM (#277776)

    They aren't compelled to make sure their new code releases are backwards-compatible with non-Philips bulbs.

    do not confuse the issue. it's not a compatibility issue, it's Philips purposefully locking out bulbs that Philips/Apple didn't make. no changes were going to be made to the protocol, so Philips bulbs would still work with other lighting systems, just not the other way around.

    • (Score: 2) by EvilSS on Thursday December 17 2015, @09:48PM

      by EvilSS (1456) Subscriber Badge on Thursday December 17 2015, @09:48PM (#277922)

      What the hell does Apple have to do with this? They do not make any lightbulbs.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by Gravis on Thursday December 17 2015, @10:10PM

        by Gravis (4596) on Thursday December 17 2015, @10:10PM (#277936)

        sounds like you need to read up on the story. [hackaday.com]

        The short version is that, ZigBee standards be damned, your future non-Philips lights won’t be allowed to associate with the Philips bridge. Your GE and Osram bulbs aren’t Friends of Hue. DIY RGB strips in your lighting mix? Not Friends of Hue. In fact, you won’t be surprised to know who the “Friends of Hue” are: other Philips products, and Apple. That’s it. If you were used to running a mixed lighting system, those days are over. If you’re not on the friends list, you are an Enemy of Hue.

        • (Score: 2) by EvilSS on Friday December 18 2015, @12:10AM

          by EvilSS (1456) Subscriber Badge on Friday December 18 2015, @12:10AM (#278009)

          Apple is on there because Hue works with Apple's Homekit. They don't own Phillips, and Apple certainly does not make lightbulbs for it.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday December 17 2015, @05:39PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Thursday December 17 2015, @05:39PM (#277782) Journal

    "It would be a dick move to purposefully break backwards-compatibility"

    Drop the "backwards-" from that statement, and that is precisely what they did. They intentionally broke compatibility with anyone and everyone who hadn't paid the extortion fee to become a "freind of Philip".

    At least that's how I read it. There was no "backward-compatibility" issue - the hardware basically all does the same. Some of the hardware is more compatible than other hardware, but all of it responds to "light up" commands. Pretty colors may or may not display as Philips intended, but the lights light up. That should be where Philip's concern begins and ends.

    It's alright to tout their own hardware as more compatible, and/or more capable It's equally alright to announce that "freinds of Philip" is equally compatible, and equally capable. But, refusing to communicate with other brands of hardware is unethical. It's the very same thing that Microsoft did when they coded Windows 3.1 to check for MSDOS, then refuse to load if other DOS systems were found. Again, in that case, there was no compatibility issue - Windows simply refused to load on top of any DOS system that wasn't Microsoft.

    • (Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday December 17 2015, @11:05PM

      by edIII (791) on Thursday December 17 2015, @11:05PM (#277972)

      Some of the hardware is more compatible than other hardware, but all of it responds to "light up" commands. Pretty colors may or may not display as Philips intended, but the lights light up. That should be where Philip's concern begins and ends.

      I agree, but a compromise would be Philip's setting a default checkbox to enforce "compatibility mode only", or friends-of-Hue-mode. When unchecking it, Philip's should provide warnings, links, and proof that "substandard" products lead towards inferior experiences.

      If they gave actual examples online of the issues faced with the inferior hardware, that could go a long way to convincing power users not to use anything substandard. Their R&D department, at a minimum, should have internal documents supporting the need for a firmware change. I say this because my first thought was if Philips was right about the problems, and, well... there is an awful lot of cheaply made shit out there.

      In my mind the real issue was that Philips was treating their customers as if they were idiots, when it should have been informational in nature only with a choice still provided to "break your own equipment if you really feel like it".

      Since I'm not a millionaire, I obviously don't have any of the fancy ass lighting systems to know if Philips was just making all of the problems up. I still use the same bulbs my grandfather did :)

      --
      Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
  • (Score: 1) by BrockDockdale on Thursday December 17 2015, @07:51PM

    by BrockDockdale (5983) on Thursday December 17 2015, @07:51PM (#277852)

    Yeah to me this "ungracious explanation" sounds pretty level-headed and certainly way less hysterical than this summary and all the petty outrage. Doesn't seem all that "embarrassing" or like "backing down" from anything either. There's enough real drama in the world without making it where it doesn't exist.

    • (Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday December 17 2015, @10:56PM

      by edIII (791) on Thursday December 17 2015, @10:56PM (#277968)

      Technically it meets the definition of ungracious, because it was unwelcome and unacceptable as a statement. That being said though, it's probably only because they refused to acknowledge their previous actions were bad. IMO, that was the ungracious part.

      "The change was made in good faith". I'm guessing nobody believes that.

      --
      Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @07:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @07:52PM (#277855)

    I think their device was advertised to be standard compliant. For it not to be complaint with the standards as advertising is false advertising. For them to claim that it's compliant with the standards and then to make them no longer compatible after people purchased it is not acceptable. Had they advertised that it's only guaranteed to work with certain devices before the initial release (before anyone already bought it) then that's OK. Otherwise it's fraud, something any just government should not tolerate (though I'm sure it's something many of the shills around here don't think is that big a deal).

    Then again given our broken government it seems like fraud is perfectly acceptable. Look at what happened with Sony and how they advertised Linux to work with the Playstation and later decided to remove that feature. No no no no, consumer backlash is what's needed to keep corporations in line these days (which should be a last resort. First resort should be the company's own moral conscience. Second resort should be the legal system. Last resort should be public/consumer backlash). We can no longer depend on the courts or the government, it's too expensive a process and there is no way to guarantee that consumers will win against big corporations even in cases of clear fraud so often times it's not even worth the hassle. It's sad that it has come to this ...