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Comment by jimrandomh | Hacker News Reader

This is neither the first time Google's done something like this to customers, nor the first time Tony Fadell has been directly involved. When they pulled Google Glass from the market, it was concurrent with moving the Glass team to Fadell's leadership. They didn't go quite so far as to push an update to brick devices, but they left the software in a broken state, and refused to open source their fork of Android so users could fix it themselves. Nest has also burned a lot of Google's goodwill with badly designed smoke detectors (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsMkLaEiOY) and thermostats (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/fashion/nest-thermostat-gl...).

And then there's this, on a recent HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11105510

> "I still wake up with something like PTSD occasionally from getting yelled at and bullied by Tony Fadell almost literally every day while I was there."

> "Tony literally stood up at an all-hands after the Alphabet thing and said "Fuck being Googley" (direct quote)."

I think Google/Alphabet need to take a serious look at what Nest has been doing to their brand. A few thousand very-pissed-off people here and a few thousand very-pissed-off people there add up to a serious liability for a company like Google.

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I know almost nothing about the inner workings of Google or the Nest team, and yet I regularly hear about Tony and what a piece of work he is.

If someone like myself, only casually acquainted with the organization, hears so many bad things about Tony, how does he still have a job? Forget his apparent management incompetence, at this point it's just bad PR for Google.

> how does he still have a job

There is a lag between management incompetence and revenue.

Often these people are very personable when they want to be. They use this trait to manage up but only those below them, and without the power to make changes, see the real person. This is why and exectutive team needs to be themself spending time at the working level or have eyes/ears there.

That honestly sounds like psychopathic behaviour...

It is: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/06/14/why-som...

> If someone like myself, only casually acquainted with the organization, hears so many bad things about Tony, how does he still have a job?

Vivek "Vic" Gundotra did serious damage to Google's corporate image and was seriously reviled within Google, yet he stuck around for years. It's possible that Google upper management thinks that Fadell might be able to pull off a bet-the-company move. Gundotra was tasked with the same thing.

Or, it's possible that Google was contractually obligated to keep Gundotra around for a period of time, and is under the same obligation with Fadell. shrug

> Or, it's possible that Google was contractually obligated to keep Gundotra around for a period of time, and is under the same obligation with Fadell.

I can't believe that they would have so much negotiating power that there's no way out for Google. Even if it's moving them to be the VP of janitor closets.

At this level, there are a few issues:

1. potential reputation and organisational damage that such a person can bring to an organisation without carefully managing the situation;

2. in a company as big as Google (and frankly, one that is doing as well as Google!) it may take quite a lot of time to truly uncover the damage that a person is doing to an organisation, especially if that person is on good terms with upper management;

3. At a high enough level of management in a big enough company, lawyers and professional negotiators can wangle some amazingly good terms into the manager's contract. This can make it exceptionally tricky to remove this person quickly, or even move them sideways (if you move someone sideways, then you change their authority on a variety of things, which almost certainly changes their job description and thus their contract. This goes double if you demote them, even for the same money).

I can't speak for anything going on at Google of course, but I guess I can speculate that it might have been a combination of all three of these things. Which is utter speculation, so feel free to duly assign it the value that you feel it is worth :-)

From https://daringfireball.net/misc/2016/03/the-information-tony... : "Mr. Duffy never got a reply from Mr. Page, but the representative eventually told Mr. Duffy that Mr. Page had considered the offer but declined"

In fairness, asking the CEO of the company if they'll fire someone and let you replace someone two managerial steps above yourself is rarely if ever going to work. ;)

Its worth a shot. Especially when you already have your check for your stock for the company you sold. :)

Sundar Pichai still has a job.

What have you heard about Pichai?

Curious about this too... most "tech industry" news I've read of him is full of fawning admiration.

Google is incredibly good at their "PR releases disguised as interviews". Google senior employee puff pieces are pretty amazing. While such interviews aren't "paid" persay, you only get such interviews (and the clicks/ad-views they bring) if you portray those people in a positive light.

Though if you scrape them for minor bits, you find some minor hints. For example, one of those fawning admiration posts about him, two years ago, mentioned that he killed the Android laptop project, because it was competing with his own project, Chromebooks.

I recently heard the 'tack Android apps onto Chrome OS' strategy described as a "trainwreck" by a Google employee, and that ship has now been righted: Android is working on multi-window views in Android 6.x, and it's looking like Android is once again looking at a single converged OS for multiple form factors.

Ubuntu and Windows, of course, have been working on this for a while. Had Pichai not interfered out of his own ego for his own pet project, Google would be leading this curve, not trailing behind. As another commenter said above, "There is a lag between management incompetence and revenue". But Android was leading this until Pichai got in the way.

Between a huge stumble like this, that the media barely even noticed, and the fact that under Pichai, Google has lost almost all consumer trust, I have a hard time believing Sundar doesn't deserve a large helping of the blame.

This hardly seems like a huge stumble.

Depends how well converged OSes start to take the main stage. If Windows gets a lot of traction with it (more likely than Ubuntu, to be honest), it could be one of those things where Google being two years ahead of the game would've helped. I see what Microsoft is doing today, and thinking "THIS was why I was so excited about Android when 3.0/4.0/etc. came out."

And considering the stumbles the ad market, their primary business, is having, being a strong device platform provider, which they've already shown they can monetize (outside of ads, Android is probably their next most profitable space), is really key.

Two years ago? Strange, I worked with Android in PC form-factor 3 years ago and while I haven't been following it, I was sure they're everywhere already.

I'm curious about what you might have heard too. I have only met Sundar briefly, but I've seen him speak a lot. He honestly seems like one of the nicest guys I've met - and from what I've heard, most people seem to agree.

>how does he still have a job

Certain people are gifted with the ability to "kiss up and kick down" their team, i.e., kiss up to those they need to impress, and for anyone else that is less valuable, "kick them" or treat them with less regard.

Here is a good Wikipedia article, with several case studies: John Bolton, Robert McNamara. Maybe someone can add his name to this list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss_up_kick_down

"Gifted"?

Yes, normally a "gift" that keeps giving, even after that person leaves the company entirely.

This. Spot on. Not just for Tony, but for everyone who is admired at Nest. First-line managers (not all, only the ones that the company celebrates and adores) especially - making life difficult for poor individual contributors (micromanagement, zero positive feedback or encouragement, tons of critical feedback), all the while sucking up to the middle managers who think their lieutenants are the best thing since sliced bread.

Larry tends to be very loyal to his lieutenants. I'd say this is a combination of 1.) his personality type 2.) that you have to be, in order to get people to work for you when it's clear that you aren't going to step aside any time soon and 3.) his long-term orientation, where he's willing to endure a lot of temporary hiccups with the faith that people will eventually get the job done.

All of these are positive character traits, but they also mean that some...well...sociopathic individuals have managed to gain his trust and hold it for long periods of time, doing significant damage to the organization in the process. In the past, he has eventually fixed things, it just took years.

It's hard to say that this is wrong, per se, since the alternative is often a slash-and-burn CEO that axes executives at the first sign of trouble in their divisions. You can't do anything long-term under those conditions either.

What do you mean about his personality type?

I'm a fan of Meyers-Briggs, so through that lens, I'd peg Larry as an INTJ, and INTJs tend to be very loyal to people close to them at the expense of not getting close to very many people. Tertiary Fi and all that.

Through the non-MBTI lens, just that he tends to be long-term oriented, inwardly-focused, and prefers to invest in long-term relationships with a few trusted people rather than gregariously flirt with many. He wanted all of his executives to pledge to commit to Google for 10 years when he became CEO in 2011 (ironically, most of them have left by now).

They can easily fix this. If they don't, it speaks volumes about how Nest/Google/Alphabets values customer relationships. Take all the other google services and imagine what would happen if google were just as reckless, especially with long life products like home installed devices.

Home automation installation services or even contractors would also be cautious about Nest.

Empathy is not a core competency of google as an enterprise.

I see it as an extension of their consumer software policy.

Have little to no customer service, even when money is involved, letting products stagnate for years and frequently pulling the plug on services.

Which is scary, because this hardware is dependent on Google-owned software and services.

These shenanigans by Google and the numerous reports of the problems with Nest and their smoke detectors have basically guaranteed I don't include Google devices in my home automation setup. I would rather manually muck around with a raspberry pi and some random sensors bought online than rely on a Google product at this point.

There's a lot of room for a vendor to come in with open products, a pledge to maintain that open-ness, and decent integration to really take over the home automation market. I really feel like all the existing products are too proprietary to be of any interest to us home automation geeks.

Yeah, unfortunately, there's a huge middle ground not being tackled. I use INSTEON devices, which are proprietary, but can only interface outside through my PC's serial adapter (or a cloud hub, which I obviously didn't buy). I want consumer-quality switches and such in my house, so this was the obvious choice.

But then the open source hardware stuff is almost entirely limited to 'build it yourself' boards. And sure, I could buy some Arduino and Raspberry Pi hardware (I actually have a lot of it lying around) and spend a bunch of time working on it, but then it wouldn't be a nice wall unit like my switches I have.

There's a huge open space here. It's a market just asking for someone to step in and make products.

I have ALC (On-Q/Legrand) switches for the same reason. Hard-wired control, but reasonably nice (at least not clown) looking and operating switches in manual mode.

That's a key thing too that things like Wi-Fi lightbulbs and crud can't offer: Your light switch should still ALWAYS work like an ordinary light switch!

Companies sunset SAAS products (with subscription fees, one time setup fees etc) all the time when the cost to support them becomes too high, growth stalls etc. Clearly Alphabet/Nest could have done a better job of customer service and offered users a partial refund or discount on a replacement product. That said, is it realistic to expect a company to support a software service indefinitely (when the business case no longer makes sense), just because it's tied to a piece of physical hardware that you paid $199 for a few years ago?

> when the business case no longer makes sense

Doing this kills ALL future business of this type. Who would buy such a device knowing this could happen?

Unless they don't plan on making consumer appliances anymore.

I'm not saying it's an ideal outcome for a company to sunset a product, but why is the consumer expectation so different for pure software vs a connected hardware device (i.e. software + hardware)? Consumers experience sunk cost when any product gets sunset, whether it's hardware or not.

Hardware has that upfront cost which consumers take as this should work for x amount of time. In the case of electronics I would hope they last a significant amount of time. If my hardware can work still at least give me a way to write my own code for it or use it as is with the "cloud" portions disabled/removed. If I get a new cell phone my old one doesn't need to become a paperweight because the carrier isn't pushing out updates. I can still use it as is or update it myself.

>Hardware has that upfront cost which consumers take as this should work for x amount of time.

What is X?

I think it depends on the product and the cost I am paying. x for a checkout lane electronic keychain that I paid $1.99 for I don't expect to last very long a month or two maybe. When I am paying $300 I would hope to get many years out of it before there may be hardware (rather than fixable software bugs) failure from a bad capacitor. Even then if you have the electronic knowhow you can replace the parts and keep it working. What lifetime do you expect out of a new TV you purchase? Should it stop working after a year or two or just continue to work as long as the hardware works?

Not sure the analogy works. You would still need to pay some carrier an ongoing service fee to use your cell phone. Here we are talking about a connected device where the software service is offered for free.

Only if you want to use the carrier.

I have old phones that can't make telephone calls, but they still work fine as connected devices via wifi. They still work as cameras, mp3 players, gaming machines etc.

Mostly it is because "Connected to the point of bricking" is very new.

Most "connected" devices simply have lesser or limited functionality when services they are connected to disappear.

It also comes down to Ownership. When I buy a device I expect it work until it gives up its electronic ghost. When I subscribe to a service I expect it to work for the month I paid for.

Ofcourse I would have never bought that hub in the first place because I require my products at a minimum to have a open API that can be used for Compatibility later.

Wall Garden should be resisted by consumers, it is sad most people do not even look at that, hopefully cases like this will push consumers to DEMAND manufacturer have open and inter operable systems

Interesting. The reality is that every connected device has an ongoing cost to the company that sells it. Most consumers probably aren't aware of this. Depending on the architecture, # of users etc this could be some fraction of a cent/month in AWS costs or much more. Should Connected Hardware companies/startups disclose this upfront when making the sale? i.e. say "Your $199 purchase includes a free license to our software for x years."

>>The reality is that every connected device has an ongoing cost to the company that sells it.

Not true, that is only the case for devices where the company wants to have exclusive control over the connection and resulting data, There are all kinds of open devices sold where I can connect to servers run by community, myself, or the company (many provide the cloud service and the device separately, so I buy the device then i have to buy a monthly service as well)

>Should Connected Hardware companies/startups disclose this upfront when making the sale? i.e. say "Your $199 purchase includes a free license to our software for x years."

That should be the minimum disclosure requirement.

The consumer expectation may be different for web sites (as those were always closer to services than products and so you never "bought" them in the first place).

For traditional desktop software and standalone apps, the expectation is not different at all. I still own a lot of old pc games that I bought at some point and play occasionally and would find it extremely irritating if they suddenly stopped to function without any acceptable reason.

Recently, things may be changing with mandatory auto-updating, subscription models and many apps just being front-ends for server-side processes. But as far as I know, most of those changes are pushed by vendors/developers and accepted by consumers as a necessary evil (if at all). It's not at all that customers would suddenly expect something different.

What bugs me is how many companies these days want to include reliance on the cloud for features that don't require it at all, in the interest of gaining access to more customer usage data, but then when they turn the servers off the product becomes useless.

This has become a key thing that I look for when buying new products. If the product relies on the cloud for a feature that I think should be entirely offline, the product will be immediately returned and a negative review will be left on the resellers site.

A perfect example was the early version of the Lockitron device. It required cloud access but had a one time payment. Based on that information alone I could not justify the purchase to myself even just to play with because it's a bad business model.

How do you determine if a given feature 'should' be entirely offline?

Unlocking my front door? That has to work without internet access.

Turning my lights on and off? That has to work without internet access.

Logging my heart rate et all, ala fitbit? Nope, I should be able to use a server of my choosing, requiring that I use cloud servers for something I paid a one time fee for is an instant deal breaker.

A service that logged all of my access times and determined whether or not I was home based on the result? I would prefer that be run from my own server even optionally with a DNS hijack, but I would understand the need for the cloud in this situation.

Thanks for the info! Have you found many devices that meet this criteria? I can't think of any smart locks that run locally.

Though I haven't confirmed that this was fixed in new models, when I was first reviewing the Lockitron I contacted their support folks with my concerns about paying a one time fee for something that waa easentually a service and about being able to run my own server and (one of) the founder emailed me back and explained that in the next version my concerns would be addressed. That gave me hope for their next iteration but I haven't been back to them yet. I look forward to checking them out again.

The Turtlebeach Audiotron relied on accessing Turtlebeach's servers to function. They abandoned the Audiotron, and eventually the server, but did provide a patch so you could still use the Audiotron.

I still use the Audiotron every day. Still haven't found anything better.

Fitbit. I fail to see why tracking my health, location, etc. is a cloud function, beyond selling my data. At least give me the watch free if you're going to sell my data too.

They then add insult to injury by making me sync via a dongle /connected cable to my laptop; at which point I could just as easily sync to a desktop client vs their otherwise "disconnected cloud".

I wouldn't have such a grudge against fitbit if they would make it easier to log to your own server. Even if I had to hijack DNS to accomplish it, I wouldn't mind. Its not like many people would take advantage of the option.

But the fact that they force you to use their servers to store your data so that they can turn around and sell it, frankly I hope they get sued for something. Anything.

There should be a law against selling customer data without the expressed consent of the customer whos data is being sold, per purchase. Even if the company is acquired.

I don't like this at all, but I think you've got the calculus wrong. If you truly believe in IoT, then the percentage of future Alphabet customers who will ever hear about this scandal is tiny.s

Oh don't worry. I'll do my part in making sure more people hear about this.

Seriously though. Highlighting the ridiculousness of the current approach to IoT (including laughing off startups in this area that follow the SaaS/cloud model with hardware) is probably the only reasonable way of this mess.

Depends how you sunset it. Depends on the reasonable life of the product. In Europe at least Consumer Legislation has an expectation of a reasonable life. It's not reasonable for instance for lots of your fridges to die after only a couple of years. Car makers have to provide spare parts for, I think, six years after the end of production of a model.

I think a lot more could be done to sunset products gracefully, and with consideration for the paying customer. We'll be ceasing updates for this in a year, we'll keep the server active for x years. Be aware there will be no security fixes. Like the phased EoL of Windows releases.

I think quite a few examples of smart things are getting dangerously close to, or already passing, the line that would fit the legal definition of unreasonably short. SaaS only? We need to wait for case law and legislation to catch up I think.

Eighteen months life, then intentionally break your $300 product, with only 6 weeks notice? I think it would make an interesting test case with reasonable chance of success.

I trust Google very little as far as sunsetting their many releases.

Damnit. If you're going to remove my ability to use it after 18 months, then just sell it to me on an 18 month contract for $20/month and let me decide whether to sign. It's already clear I don't own the hardware, so why not make it official?

It would be tough for a hardware startup to do that, since they must buy the hardware upfront before they ship it to the user (and returns always cost $). What if the manufacturer stated clearly that your upfront purchase includes a free license to the SW for x months?

They're not a startup any more. I agree, they were in a tough situation. It's difficult for Nest, it's more difficult for consumers.

... then I would fully expect that I can replace their software with that made by others. Then feel free to make a business decision that part of the original product is no longer profitable and you're leaving the marketplace for sw/support - I still won't like it but at least the consumer has options to live with their not-fully dead hardware.

As a consumer - "hey too bad you didn't want to make a business of this but you suckered me in with your shiny new fangled thing and I gave you money for it - I didn't give you permissions to then decide that you didn't make enough money so now you're going to take your ball and go home leaving me with an expensive door stop"

I agree that it's annoying when a company sunsets any product (HW, SW or other), but why is it so much more annoying when it's a hardware product? Is it because you still have the physical thing? Most SAAS products have upfront/monthly costs, and when they fold consumers lose these sunk costs, but nobody is writing medium articles about that...

Again, depends why.

They went bust or are closing? OK that sucks, but it happens. Can't really be helped. Even if it's a hardware thing it's going to happen if there's a server-side component rather than entirely stand alone. Best case release some code, specs or open source to enable some hackery to keep hardwareThing viable.

We got bought, OldThing is boring so it's closing in 4 weeks, we're truly excited to be working with FaceGoog on the future of NewThing. Seriously not ok. People should be writing Medium articles about it. And yelling.

> but why is it so much more annoying when it's a hardware product?

Because applying SaaS business model to hardware is simply fucked up. Also, for many of those products one has to expend significant effort to make them not hackable by end-users, so if a company decides to make a proprietary, cloud-dependent device that then gets bricked when they move on, it only shows they actually worked hard to fuck their customers. Not to mention that in many of those products the cloud is not needed for any sensible reason and is in fact bad engineering - it's included only to make more money off people.

Sadly, as long as customers play ball this nonsense will continue - the market sells what people buy.

Having worked on "smart" hardware, this can't be done. For the reason of regulation.

Essentially, the law demands that no matter what you do with the software, the product won't malfunction (not just "not explode", it needs to work). Obviously that means no software that isn't made by the same engineering team ... also once the hardware is out that means no changes to the software unless someone does make their fridge explode. Even if they change the temperature 50 times a minute with the door open that can't affect the lifetime of the product. Needless to say, you block this in the software.

Unless courts start putting responsibility for the things people do with their own hardware on those people, this won't be forthcoming.

This makes sense into you throw OTA updates and cloud services into the mix. I'm not sure how those would even be allowed by the "the software must not change" rule. But even if you interpret it generosity, shutting down the service or pushing an update that bricks the device is very clearly an update that breaks functionality. Wouldn't that be forbidden by the above rules as well?

Also, there are "hackable" products on the market, e.g. the OpenWRT routers. Those still seem to be allowed.

Yep I would agree that breaking updates are a risk. In the case of a cloud service though, I'd bet the contract would specify a minimum maintenance duration very clearly spelled out, and that's going to be a few years, no more.

OpenWRT routers have been in the legal clear zone for a while (due to FCC exception for the WiFi bands), but that's changing [1]

[1] http://www.cnx-software.com/2015/07/27/new-fcc-rules-may-pre... (FCC page https://apps.fcc.gov/oetcf/kdb/forms/FTSSearchResultPage.cfm... )

People are somewhat confused about this. For instance you can change the firmware of smartphones, no ? Well, no, you can't. You see, what people call a cell phone contains a 100% locked down actual cell phone, and a PDA that's completely independent (and in some cases, more than one locked down system. E.g. NFC is it's own locked down system as well). These are fun things, they're smaller and smaller. In the last 2 years the actual cellphone, everything except the antenna fits in 0.5cm x 0.5cm x 0.1cm package that actually contains multiple chips. These things are connected to the audio devices of the phone, and therefore have sole control over what comes out of the speaker and where the microphone goes. They also have a serial network interface these days for 3G/4G, and the sim connects directly to these chips.

So technically android (or ios, or windows phone, or blackbery, ...) does not run on cellphones, it runs on the PDAs that we insert into cellphones. Therefore it does not need approval.

It also means that Android/IOS do not actually control (for example) the audio on smartphones, or whether a call is answered. Or whether, when asked for the location of the phone or the contents of SMS'es, or to call out and send out the audio the microphone receives, whether those requests are answered. Android/ios would never see those requests (though you may find the microphone suddenly doesn't work anymore in apps). And yes, this works even when there is no sim in the phone.

Whilst there are cellphones that don't provide law enforcement (I wonder if it's only law enforcement though) with these features, they're older models and are getting phased out. If you read this site, I bet your phone has these features. And like all features you don't control, you wouldn't like them if you knew what they were.

Forever? No. But what is reasonable to you? 0 days? What if it's a home appliance I paid around $5,000 for, like my most recent furnace install? Also 0 days?

After Google purchased Dropcam, they censored a thread about it's inability to save video feeds locally.

Google has always had poor customer service, this is nothing new. Most of their (profitable) product lines don't need customer service representation, so they don't care about it.

It needs to be understood that home automation appliances are going to be assumed to be long-life products. Nobody thinks about their light switch being an old version and needing to be replaced.

I'd say any home automation installer should be very wary of Silicon Valley-based automation "services", and focus on robust products which have been available for a long time.

I've done such installations. The simple solution is to use Honeywell products. It's good stuff that works as intended. The downside is its not even in the same ballpark as modern google/amazon/startup type devices. The customer gets what the customer wants so if someone wants ultra modern then conservatively designed products don't fly. Best advice is to vote with your wallet and stop trusting google products.

Good point.

My Hue lights work without an internet connection, and can be controlled from a device on my local network. And they are also made by an old-school company, Phillips.

There's ups and downs to Hue. If you recall earlier they tried axing out support for third party bulbs from their app. But they also deserve some kudos for basing their app and devices on a open platform to begin with.

Yes, but once people protested, they admitted their mistake and reverted it. AFAIK their position now is that they won't go out of their way to support third party bulbs unless the manufacturer joins their "friends of Hue" program, but their hub firmware isn't blocking them and should work with other bulbs that meet certain specs.

Home Automation is still niche. They probably hope to make up on the volume. It does not matter how badly they treat their current customer: if they find the iPhone of home automation, they will have hundred of millions of customers to make up for it.

They probably hope the guy will find the next big thing. That's more Google working internally as a VC in markets to be. Not that I think it is alright from such an established business like Google.

A few thousand very-pissed-off people here and a few thousand very-pissed-off people there...

s/people/early adopters/

Early adopters are people too.

Of course, that doesn't mean they're not pissed off, so nothing in your comment invalidates the parent's.

Edit: I assumed ill intent. Corrected it.

I read that slightly differently; selectively pissing off early adopters is worse, since they disproportionately influence products' odds of success.

Exactly. Google thrives on early adopters waiting in line for and spinning up their newest shiny thing. Sorry if the sarcasm was lost there.

It was lost on me, yes. Thanks for clearing it up.

Nothing says "fuck you" quite like pissing all over the people that helped make your platform a success by being the first to commit to your product.

Do you have some beef with him? I'm not a big fan of this sort of personal attack of someone's character on HN.

Lot's of people are throwing Google and alphabet in to the same bucket here. Please don't do that. The alphabet companies are free to be ran however they wish and Nest is an extreme example of NOT running a company the Google way. When the alphabet change happened, this became quite clear in just a few months time internally. What you're seeing here is further evidence of that.

Nobody gives a crap about these semantic games. Nest is owned by Google.

https://nest.com/about/

I'm trying to explain (perhaps poorly?) that the change is not simply semantic. No one who is part of Google proper has any say in what nest, glass or those other companies do at this point. None of the culture, support etc... transfers over. The CEOs of these new alphabet companies are free to do as they please. What you're seeing here is this in action.

Saying Google are somehow accountable for nest or glass is like saying that dropbox are accountable for the actions of reddit. They are literally that disconnected now when it comes to how the businesses are managed.

They all ultimately answer to Larry Page, presumably.

All of the CEOs? Sure. Sundar manages Google though.

Consumers don't care how about Google/Alphabet organizes itself. Google owns Nest; that fact can't be avoided. When you own a company that intentionally bricks their customers' $300 devices for no other reason that they don't want to support them anymore, you're going to have to deal with the negative perception that it creates.

In this case, being disconnected is a deliberate choice by Google. If that leads to problems, they're still responsible. You can't just take your hands off something and disclaim all responsibility for what happens afterwards.

It was a deliberate choice by the former Google board, who no longer runs Google and now runs Alphabet. The blame lies with Alphabet, not one of it's many subsidiaries.

I think the problem is that Alphabet is basically what we used to call Google, and what is now called Google is just one aspect of what we used to call Google. Referring to Alphabet as "Google" is outmoded but it's sort of like saying "Blackwater" instead of "Academi."

If this is so true, then why don't the complete the task and spin the company off and hold a controlling share?

They did. 100% share.

That's exactly what they did.

I think this is a little more tricker. When customers make buying decisions, there is "Nest, owned by Alphabet and not likely to be shut because they are broke" benefit that they get. When they fail to meet those expectations, it should and will certainly reflect on the trust for Alphabet. Mainly because of your argument: Alphabet has little control over the companies and one should stop expecting good treatment and product lifecycle just because it is under Alphabet umbrella.

What Nest is doing is little different to Reader or the other products Google killed. Alphabet is the common link and is clearly OK with this behaviour.

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