Nest Reminds Customers That Ownership Isn't What It Used to Be

Good luck with your work, it looks really useful and interesting. I feel this is what we all dreamed up in the early internet years while watching Star Trek. Digital controls for everything, and not being beholden to others for the way in which we manage the controls.

I'm also interested in electricity monitors but I think that's a separate thing.

A lot of the home automation world is a closed, proprietary mishmash right now. (Although there are some open standards ranging from old school stuff like X10 to newer Zigbee stuff, I don't think products like Nest use them).

I also think people expect that when they buy a device, some corporate decision isn't going to brick it. (Stories in this line in my opinion will eventually kill the current hype on the "cloud").

"Open source" is probably less important to most end users, but it can be quite important to developers, power users, and tinkerers. And enthusiasts can drive products.

When Tesla and Nest created a high-end market, they created self-contained objects. They sold because they were good, not because they had a competitive edge on the closed-source software running them. I set Apple apart because they have high margins on accessories, so open APIs would be a drawback here. My point is: We spend that much money for those products because the're good quality in themselves.

The fact that they're closed source means knock-offs can't copy the internal design and will be crap. The only thing required for an open-source IoT company to lead is to persuade us that knock-offs will be crap too (e.g. "uncertified", then spread stories about knock-offs exploding, or shorter length of life, or other leaks of PII, or illegal). The rest of open-source is a huge competitive advantage for relevance in the long term, ecosystem, customer recognition, etc.

Knives are quite open-source but we still buy €200 knives from time to time.

"Lifetime..." "has now run its course..."

/me smh

I think that companies should be more careful at offering "lifetime subscriptions" or similar stuff. You shouldn't be allowed to take back that. Can the people in their boards be sued for damages even if the company closes? I don't know about the USA but in other countries board members are personally responsible in some cases, for example frauds.

FTFY

It was published in a collection https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogon_diabła

Google translate: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=pl&u=http://...

Whole collection is high quality scifi, equal to Asimovs 'The Last Question' for example.

If Alphabet were to buy a struggling company, they don't get to go to it's creditors and say "We will pay you $1, which you should consider a blessing, since if the this company went out business you would have got nothing".

Similarly, if the company made sales of a product on the notion of "lifetime support and updates", a purchasing company is absolutely responsible to uphold those guarantees (this is the type of thing companies do due diligence for before acquiring a business).

Well, if this company happens to be a publicly held company then its investors should be mad about this habit of going in and buying companies that are not of value to them.

But I bet they did see a value, but where there is value there can also be liabilities and you have to assume both of them. You don't get to choose just the value.

Netflix's stock price went down, but they already had a huge streaming business and were not distressingly low on cash.

In fact, raising prices generated record revenue.

So your comments don't make any sense to me.

However, if you had said, "Hollywood could rape Netflix any time they wanted on licensing fees," then that is actually true and the reason Netflix is a sketchy investment, and why they are creating their own content.

Their cars are deathtraps without human drivers.

Because there's a giant surge current when you start up a motor (like that in an A/C compressor), and it's just plain bad and even annoying to have your A/C cycle between on and off rapidly, a thermostat will intentionally overshoot the set point when cooling, and then undershoot that same set point when waiting for the house to heat up before it turns the A/C back on (or vice versa for heating).

Hysteresis is absolutely necessary to avoid both this problem, and also the problem where your temperature sensor isn't perfectly accurate and the readings from it will vary a bit from reading to reading.

  if (temp > max + error)
    if (off (ac))
      turn_on (ac);

  if (temp < max - error)
    if (on (ac))
      turn_off (ac);

  if (temp < min - error)
    if (off (heat))
      turn_on (heat);

  if (temp > min + error)
    if (on (heat))
      turn_off (heat);

Also, overshooting you ideal temp is fairly easy to do as there can be a lot of hot air in the vents even after you turn down the heat. So a little predictive modeling can be useful.

Also, you should note that most of them also don't show the exact temperature in the room... it's an algorithm. Your furnace might heat to 68 on the display but the actual temp may be between 67 and 69, but if your display temp constantly bounced it would result in mass consumer disappointment.

For finer control of room temps, people often use mechanical radiator thermostats. They work just fine too.

New electronic models are usually just a thermistor with some analogue hysteresis. They work fine as well.

I might expect something with the extras you're describing to appear in a new office building, but in the UK at least adding PID and/or some kind of learning system to a domestic thermostat is overkill.

Generally, simple solutions are less likely to go badly wrong.

That's the tragic irony of Nest. The design is great, but the added value offered by a buggy and overcomplex implementation is negative.

But that said, I think it's more than that. There's no such thing as autopilot on the Internet, particularly for a company that deals with customer PII (and I count the ability to control stuff in your home in that category. :-). You can imagine the rathole -- we've all been down it a few times: You need to upgrade the kernel/libc on your EC2 instance because of the security vulnerability du jour. But libraries X and Y won't run after the upgrade, so you need to upgrade them. But the developer of those libraries changed the interface, so now you need to... yadda, yadda. One or two of those changes you can probably just hack in, but depending on how disgusting the codebase is (and let's be honest here - it was an acqui-hired startup that was probably in panic mode towards the end!), at some point, it starts looking like a choice between a total rewrite or tossing it to the wind. Suddenly that takes you up to an FTE, who in the valley is going to cost you >= $20k/month. Then you divide by the # of still-active devices (I have no idea what this # looks like) and suddenly it looks like a big resource drain for no benefits.

(Imagine, for example, that the engineers became aware of a firmware-level vulnerability that exposed all customer devices to remote exploits and control -- and somewhere between the acquisition and then the build system for rebuilding and testing the firmware had gotten screwy. Or the last set of test devices in the lab finally broke. Or that, plus it turns out the remote firmware update mechanisms had never worked in the first place, and fixing all the bugs would require not just fixing them, but actually creating and deploying an entirely new update path. Or, or....)

Of course, one can wish that were the case something like that, it had been communicated. My fingers are crossed that maybe Nest - and other companies - can use this as a learning experience and come up with policies, with teeth about acquisitions, governing the sunsetting of cloud based services that are essential for the operation of customer hardware. I'm not optimistic yet, but I'm glad to see the EFF raising the issue.

Or if you buy a shirt and wear it for 5 years - you'd go back to Kmart after 5 years and say, your shirt wore out, give me a refund?

The sense of entitlement in that statement is...pretty high. I'm just going to leave it at that.

Heck, even 5 years?

All of this for some cheap widget? (I assume from your description it's cheap).

If you can find a single case (or similar case) where this happened, I will stand corrected.

If this was a $2000 laptop, I can absolutely see that - e.g. Apple Macbooks in Australia have a statutory warranty longer than the manufacturer's 1 year warranty. But I think you'd be hard pressed trying to claim after 3-4 years that it should still apply there. And this is for a $2000 laptop.

Server and package vulnerabilities get discovered all the time.

And load is never constantly - it's not like you have 1000 users, and they do the same thing every day, 365 days a year.

And there are an army of script kiddies out there trying to break into your servers. Or maybe somebody more skilful, trying to break in and steal some PII (personally identifiable information).

Point is - the environment and your users are constantly changing. If you don't take that into account, it can blow up pretty bad.

I also wouldn't be surprised if (much like cars), tractors generally only need mechanical repairs over the duration of their lifespans.

- Economies of scale. In areas where fixed costs of production are huge, a one-size-barely-fits-all beats specialized solutions. Consider the mobile market. After Blackberry lost in the smartphone wars, there is no phone available that would be a decent tool. All of them are made for the lowest common denominator, and are useful for anything other than consumption as little as it is possible to still get people looking for practical aspects to buy them. Smartphone manufacturing has huge fixed costs, so when anyone ever tries to service a niche market, those phones are terribly expensive.

- Related: customers don't demand new things, they chose from what is available. Most people do their tasks by choosing from what is available. Rarely one does dream up a new solution (those who do end up sometimes creating them). New solutions only appear when there's a market incentive to make them - when someone believes they can make money on it. Which is determined by what can be sold profitably, not by what people actually need.

Compare: the famous (and probably misattributed) Ford quote: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Also compare: Tesla having to force the market to accept electric vehicles by pouring shit tons of money until they actually became profitable. Rarely one has both enough will to fix the world and enough money to force the market to follow.

- Related: market optimizes for profitability, not for value. "How much people are willing to pay for it" is only a proxy for "how this thing is useful". It's worth to look at the areas where this proxy fails.

- Pour enough money into sales & marketing, and you can sell anything regardless of whether it is actually useful or not. People can be manipulated into believing they need your product, or the need may be manufactured out of thin air - and nowadays it's usually cheaper than making something actually useful.

- Related: information asymmetry. The wonders of free market depend in a big part on perfect and instant information exchange. This is not the case in real world, and the companies have all the incentive to deceive and misinform customers about their products (and their competition).

Give it a bad review, post an article about it, even sue the company that made it, but I don't see why we have to fear for our future ability to own things.