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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
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @07:52PM
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 ...