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An article at The Electronic Frontier Foundation goes over a recent decision by the home automation company Nest to disable some of its customers' devices in May:
The Hub debuted in 2013 and was discontinued after Nest acquired Revolv in late 2014. One selling point was that the one-time payment of $300 included a "Lifetime Subscription," including updates. In fact, the device shipped without all of its antennas being functional yet. Customers expected that the antennas would be enabled via updates.
Customers likely didn't expect that, 18 months after the last Revolv Hubs were sold, instead of getting more upgrades, the device would be intentionally, permanently, and completely disabled.
The article also highlights the legal grey area for customers who attempt to keep their own hardware functional, due to "conflicting court decisions about the scope of Section 1201" (of the DMCA).
The EFF article links to a medium.com posting which goes over the experience of a user of the hardware in question:
On May 15th, my house will stop working. My landscape lighting will stop turning on and off, my security lights will stop reacting to motion, and my home made vacation burglar deterrent will stop working. This is a conscious intentional decision by Google/Nest. [...] Google is intentionally bricking hardware that I own.
Originally spotted at Hacker News.
Previously: Google Shows us the Future of Cloud-Dependent Home Automation
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Bobs on Thursday April 07 2016, @01:29PM
To me this decision by Google / Nest epitomizes bad management thinking.
“He knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing."
This decision was made because some manager decided he did not want the cost of keeping the servers / service alive in HIS/HER budget. So they decided to kill the service. They probably saved several thousands of dollars per year doing this.
From a corporate / strategic perspective, they just cost the company a millions of dollars of bad publicity.
Setting up a special bucket in the marketing/sales budget to pay for the ongoing server support costs called “Keeping old customers happy rather than turning them into haters” would have been a win for Google. If they had spent a bit of money then providing a transition plan for old customers to new systems they could have built up a bunch of customer loyalty / evangelizers. That would have been a ‘win’ for Google.
Instead, this action is going to make it harder for Google to sell other products and services to customers. Google WANTS to migrate as many people as possible as fast as possible to the Cloud / Internet of things. And this hurts those efforts.
So somebody said “I can save (a little bit of) money right now.” And completely ignored the longer-term, bigger implications. Sort of like firing an experienced DBA who knows your business and systems to replace them with an outsourced service. “We are saving $1k / month!” Then fixes take longer, new services / improvements are slower, you have more downtime and it ends up costing the organization as a whole buckets of money. But the guy paying for the DBA saved a few bucks!
This is an example of bad-management / bad-MBA /pointy-haired boss thinking. The guy paying for the servers saved a few bucks.
But he cost Google a whole lot more.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by snick on Thursday April 07 2016, @02:10PM
What bad publicity?
People buying Nest thermostats at Home Depot have never heard of Revolv or The Hub.
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Thursday April 07 2016, @02:28PM
google has more money than god; they can certainly AFFORD to keep running token servers, just to keep customers happy. they have a huge amount of manpower; and they never let us forget that they are the 'best minds money could buy'.
so why the lack of vision? why the lack of understanding that this will backfire on them?
where is the adult supervision, so to speak? this is what a child would do; adults are supposed to be a bit more forward thinking and able to plan for the future (ie, when the service is going to be put on sustaining, but no new features).
I continue to call google 'the short attention span company'. and they don't disappoint; they earn that title over and over, each year.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2, Insightful) by WillR on Thursday April 07 2016, @05:46PM
Sergei and Larry and "don't be evil" are long gone, and MBA management and "what does this do for next quarter's numbers?" decision making are in.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 07 2016, @06:44PM
Better then than companies where they scramble to make the current quarter's numbers look good.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by tfried on Thursday April 07 2016, @07:58PM
so why the lack of vision? why the lack of understanding that this will backfire on them? where is the adult supervision, so to speak?
Because adult supervision does not scale. Probably this decision was suggested (routinely) by a small team with the very narrow purpose of identifying services with a bad income / cost ratio. It was prepared by some lower management guy figuring that only a limited number of people would be directly screwed for a quantifiable gain. The next level up probably never had an idea what this was all about in the first place (and only five minutes to look at it), but the numbers looked good. At the next level, the obvious might have been spotted very quickly, but it simply vanished behind too much aggregation with otherwise "reasonable" decisions.
This type of mistake is promoted by a narrow cutting-costs mindset. But it is not easy to avoid in any large corporation. (Which is not meant to defend Google, here, but trying to explain how they come to make stupid mistakes like this.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 07 2016, @04:57PM
Your smartphones could really be smarter (they've got all that RAM and CPU - look at what stuff like Tasker can do if you don't believe me), but Google, Apple, etc shift most stuff to their servers, so your phones serve them as much as they serve you if not more.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 07 2016, @06:52PM
When the Google cars stop running, be sure to say "klaatu barada nikto."