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Comment by ralmidani | Hacker News Reader

What makes Nest's actions deplorable is not just that they don't want to support and maintain the product; they are also deliberately destroying pieces of hardware purchased and owned by customers.

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nest is doing the world a favor. we need to learn the lesson of closed hardware sooner rather than later.

The only people talking about this are people who already know the risks.

I agree we need to learn the lesson, but am not convinced Nest's actions are overall beneficial. Learning a hard lesson isn't the only way to learn a lesson. We need more tech companies who can lead with positive messages about openness

Have you got any evidence that they are destroying hardware?

I know it sells headlines, but I've seen zero evidence at all to back up these claims.

From what I can tell, they're simply pulling the plug on the service.

They already stopped all sales of the units nearly two years ago - in fact, that's one of the first things they did when they bought out the failing Revolv company.

So they've basically paid to keep it running for two years - and this is just speculation, but maybe they decided, this is enough, it's just bleeding money, we have zero revenue to show for it all (since we haven't sold any units in two years), we need to pull the pin on it eventually.

More likely everything is running on autopilot, well documented so low level support personnel can address any issues that might crop up, and consuming a minimal amount of revenue since the number of Revolv users is fairly static and most likely decreasing over time. I doubt it costs more than $1000/mo to operate the Revolv infrastructure, not counting the humans supporting it, who are probably spending 80%-90% of their time on non-Revolv items anyway.

The real reason for pulling the plug on Revolv is to try and drum up Nest sales, but it was executed poorly since they haven't made any particular effort to steer the screwed Revolv users to Nest, or offered any concession.

Tony Fadell will no doubt shit his pants when he reads this post, but despite how accurate it is, I don't even work there.

I should note that I think this whole thing was handled poorly, and I think there's a lot of room for our entire industry to come up with some best practices surrounding sunsetting (and, in my happy place with free ponies for everyone, mandatory open-sourcing of the backends needed with clear instructions for how customers can switch to running their own. But that's my free pony land.)

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.

If the number of active devices is too low for Nest to justify continue running the service, then they can do a "buy back" or replace it with a similar Nest device.

Ok, so you buy some widget for $300.

You get a couple years use out of it - do you really expect the company at the end of it to be like, gee, let me buy the gadget back off you?

I mean, come on....

It'd be super swell if the company decided to just throw money out at people like that, but come on, the sense of entitlement of some people here is nuts.

Look, I bought the Titanfall game. It's multiplayer-only. I knew that when I bought it. Just like the people who bought Revolv 3 or 4 years ago.

If Respawn (makers of Titanfall) decides to shut down the servers tomorrow, sure, I'll be upset, but I'm not exactly going to go on some massive nerd-rage, because I believe they should just keep it running forever.

Do you really think I'm going to turn around and demand a refund, a year later?

I work in tech - so I know how much it costs to keep infrastructure running, and the teams of people that work behind the scenes to keep it all running smoothly.

Surely we're not so disconnected that we know that we engineers get paid a pretty good amount, right?

> > If the number of active devices is too low

> do you really expect the company at the end of it to be like, gee, let me buy the gadget back off you?

Yes. If it is cheaper to migrate (or compensate) a handful of existing customers for free than to keep running a legacy service, the company should be making this call.

I mean, come on...

I knew that when I bought it. Just like the people who bought Revolv 3 or 4 years ago.

You don't really know what every person knew that bought Revolv, do you?

I work in tech

Especially since it is your business to know more about this than the average consumer?

Don't these pieces of hardware rely on their service being provided? Their service is what they want to shut down, after all; this can't have started from a desire to brick hardware devices.

The right thing to do, then, would be to release an update allowing users to direct the device to another server without having to violate DMCA's anti-circumvention clause.

Isn't the server it connects to proprietary?

People can repurpose hardware to work with a new backend, but only if the hardware is unlocked.

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