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