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Comment by victorhooi | Hacker News Reader

That story has already been beaten to death....lol.

Nest bought out Revolv - and then immediately ceased all sales.

They then kept the servers running for another 18 months, before announcing they were going to shut them down.

Revolv was an also-ran in the home automation stakes - speculation on my part, but there was probably a reason they got bought out instead of raking in the big bucks.

Let's say they sold a few thousand units - do you really think it's worth keeping it running indefinitely? A lot of those people have probably moved on.

I don't have hard data to back this up - but I have a growing suspicion most of the people shrilly screaming the loudest on HN don't actually even own a Revolv - the chances of them being one of those few thousand of couple is pretty small.

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> Let's say they sold a few thousand units - do you really think it's worth keeping it running indefinitely?

That's not the only option. Some alternatives would have been to make it not a SASS reliant brick. Or to open source enough that people could do that work themselves, at least in theory. Or to offer buybacks. I did read:

> Nest is working with customers on a case-by-case basis on compensation, according Burnett. The company would not disclose exactly how Revolv users would be compensated or whether their Revolv devices could be replaced by Nest devices.

( Edit: http://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/06/nest-to-disable-revolv-hub-mu... )

Any former Revolv users want to disclose how they did/didn't get screwed over, actually?

It says on Revolv's website that they're giving full refunds to current customers:

"If you're a current Revolv customer, please email us at help@revolv.com so we can help you out during this transition and provide you with a refund of the purchase price of your Revolv hub." - http://revolv.com/

>do you really think it's worth keeping it running indefinitely?

At some point, I think it becomes less about "worth" and more about doing the right thing. Is it fair that everyone who bought that device is left holding a worthless chunk of plastic because of the inscrutable whims of various SV tech giants?

If not for reams of legalese nobody reads and yet has to agree to in order to even hook the thing up, it would probably already be illegal in some way.

Your point about "doing the right thing" is a complete logical fallacy. Are you implying that group A is somehow more deserving that group B?

Don't forget - the "tech giants" you refer to are comprised of people, most of whom have jobs and families

This isn't about whims of tech giants - more about whims of the market.

If the pitchfork-waving masses on HN screaming about Revolv had all actually, well, bought a Revolv, I suspect the company wouldn't have gone bust. The fact of the matter is - the market (or we) spoke - we didn't like Revolv, and that was the reason they failed in the marketplace.

I don't think Nest made any secret of it - as soon as they bought out Revolv, they announced it quite publicly on their blog - we are stopping all sales of this product, immediately - but we will continue to support it for some time.

This was no deep conspiracy - it was, well, the product's a wash, we're buying out the company, and keeping the team.

Think about it - they probably still had stock of the product lying around at the time - they would rather just destroy those than sell them - what does that tell you about the product?

http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/24/7061557/nest-acquires-rev.... http://www.cepro.com/article/theories_on_home_automation_hub....

There were heaps of pundits at the time who speculated on why Revolv failed.

I think that's a far more worthy topic of discussion (i.e lessons learned on why it didn't gain traction), than going on about why we're not supporting a failed product from 2 years ago.

Charging money for hardware and then remotely disabling it sounds awfully similar to fraud.

They're giving full refunds to all their customers, so it's more like those customers got to use the device for "free" while it was available.

That is a different story. If only all vendors did the same.

No, that's literally exactly the story in question. What if this is the Google answer for hardware going forward? Buy what you're interested in before it's ready, give us signal about what's good/bad, and if we kill it we pay you back what it cost.

Isn't that what we as consumers want?

I don't think you know what a logical fallacy is. Which one did I commit? Calm down, please. I am not "waving a pitchfork". I didn't own a Reolv, I don't have a horse in this race.

However, I do think that there's a valid discussion to be had over the fate of a device that's integrated to the point a "home automation hub" is. The normal expectation is that these devices continue to work for the life of the device, not when some company throws a switch somewhere.

The problem here is that there's no alternative. No graceful degradation. If Ecobee dies tomorrow, I still have a working thermostat.

This? None. Your device is now literally and figuratively worthless, the money you spent on it literally wasted. Were I a purchaser of one of these things, I'd be feeling damn scandalized, ripped off, and rightly so.

Revolv was sold as a cloud-managed device - the thousand or so people who bought one knew this.

This isn't a unique problem just to Revolv, or home automation.

What happens when any company that provides a SaaS or cloud service goes bust?

Say you host your app on AWS, or DigitalOcean - if the company shuts down, will you claim that it's not "fair" for them to shutdown on you, and they must keep your application running?

Tech companies shut down all the time - sure, it sucks both for the people that work at that company, and for their customers (but I suspect more for the employees - you may have just lost some expensive tech toy - they've potentially lost their livelihoods.)

Let's take a step back, and look objectively at the facts - there was a small hardware startup, that created a cloud-based home automation product.

A few thousand people probably bought it - not enough to keep the company going. They were acqui-hired, all remaining stock destroyed, but the company that acquired the team decided to keep the servers up for a couple more years. After that, they announced they were pulling the plug.

Sure, it sucks - but they bought a cloud-managed product from a new hardware startup. I don't think any of these people were stupid - they knew exactly what they were buying.

If they didn't want to have this risk, then they would have bought from either 1. a larger company that was less likely to go bust or 2. a non-cloud managed product.

However, many of the advantages of the product are probably from it being cloud-managed. I see no issue with buying a cloud-managed device, as long as you know what you're getting into.

And look - let's be honest - home automation - I don't exactly want to be opening up my home network to the world, just so I can access it from my phone. Having a hosted service to do this is pretty cool.

Likewise, I don't have the compute power to do any cool ML at home - but if it was all done on the cloud, and there was a company behind it with the infrastructure and engineering effort, that's a good thing.

I have two Dropcams - they're pretty cool devices. Very easy to setup - but cloud managed. This is tradeoff I knew when I bought them. If the company disappeared, I understand my cameras would fail to work.

I would be upset - but I don't think it would be "unfair". I'd just hope that the people who worked at the company were doing alright.

they knew exactly what they were buying.

Why am I reminded of a scene from Airplane! here?

The average person probably doesn't even know what "the cloud" is beyond the name of a product or two. They know that they can push a button their phone and turn the lights off.

You imply a level of knowing and care that most people do not have, and so one that is not realistic, or reasonable to expect.

Yeah, but normally when companies get bought for small amounts of money it's because they're running out of cash and would probably get shut down anyways. If they were making a profit they'd have been bought for more or they would have raised more cash if their business looked like it might be sustainable.

I agree with you - I have no inside knowledge of this, but all the evidence from the time points to not many Revolv units being shipped - I'd be surprised if there were more than several thousand units sold in total, over the lifespan of the company.

They'd have no chance of ever recouping their investment, or gaining any kind of critical mass.

An acquirhire was probaby a good thing, at that stage - the founders/employees get a new job, and the customer base get an extension on the shutdown, at least for a couple years.

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