Nest Founder:“I Wake Up in Cold Sweats Thinking,What Did We Bring to the World?” | Hacker News Reader

Nest Founder:“I Wake Up in Cold Sweats Thinking,What Did We Bring to the World?”

fastcodesign.com

15 pointspetethomas19 comments

Couldn't help but think with that headline, maybe he needs a better thermostat?

clam down clam down... no need to roast him over his claims...

This isn't Reddit.

> “A lot of the designers and coders who were in their 20s when we were creating these things didn’t have kids. Now they have kids,” he says. “And they see what’s going on, and they say, ‘Wait a second.’ And they start to rethink their design decisions.”

Consumer tech today is very individual-centric. Game consoles require individual accounts to log in and track game progress/ownership. If your family shares a PS4 connected to the internet, you can't just turn it on and enjoy your game, you have to remember to log out of whichever family member is currently logged in and then log your own profile in and then get to your game. Similar idea applies with Steam on PC since each game is DRM'd to individuals and you have to buy multiple copies of the same game if you want different people to be able to track their own progress.

I also feel like music services also aren't really meant to be shared in a family. There could be an opportunity to make these services more group-centric. Maybe as developers (as according to one of the article's main points) get older these patterns will change.

Steam is actually somewhat interesting because they've explicitly added a "Family Sharing" feature that allows Steam accounts on the same computer to access each others library of games.

It still requires a relog cycle to switch users, but each user can track their own progress, cloud saves, achievements, etc. without having to buy multiple copies of the same game.

Netflix took a slightly different approach, allowing multiple "profiles" under a single shared login, which works well for the embedded players in set-top-boxes and consoles.

I'm not aware of anything similar for music services or other content, but it will be interesting to seem how other companies respond (or fail to).

> I'm not aware of anything similar for music services or other content

Google has the “Google Play Family Library” which covers most types of content in the Play Store (but not all individual pieces of content. of the covered types), including Apps, Video, and Books, but not Music and Newsstand items.

https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/7007852?hl=en

> Steam is actually somewhat interesting because they've explicitly added a "Family Sharing" feature that allows Steam accounts on the same computer to access each others library of games.

Huh, didn't know that, thanks

I love that it's a "will someone please think of the children" piece, but really, adults are just as self absorbed. Being able to see how everyone around you is tuned out to the real world (on their phone, talking to imaginary bluetooth people) it's hard to ignore (especially when it's the person in the car next to you).

> “And I know when I take [technology] away from my kids what happens,” Fadell says. “They literally feel like you’re tearing a piece of their person away from them—they get emotional about it, very emotional. They go through withdrawal for two to three days.”

I mean, you could say the same thing for me and SNES, and that was long before phones. Or TV.

Go watch the movie Network if you haven't seen it. TV was the Facebook of its day.

I think the real question is one of human psychology and development. Now that we have more power, more information at our command, how do we use that? How does society, psychology and individual action need to change in order to let humans use the ever increasing power of technology responsibly? Same goes for climate change, nuclear weapons, poverty, healthcare, etc.

Supposedly the author of "the one device" book heard about Tony Fadell from his peers at Apple and they said, "don't believe a word he says". Tony just admitted to making up a huge lie to the author about Apple VP of Marketing Phil Schiller.

Tony's involvement with the iPhone appears to have been close to zilch. His iPod group tried to make a iPod with a phone in it using the click wheel as the user interface. It was terrible, so Jobs went with the Mac team who built a tiny touchscreen based Nextstep computer that became the iPhone.

Slightly tangential, but it reminds me a bit of the viva_la_AIsistance episode of the Partially Derivative podcast (34 minute mark, discussion starting around 22 minutes in) where they talk about children growing up telling digital assistants like Alexa and Siri to do things for them.

http://partiallyderivative.com/podcast/2017/06/20/viva_la_AI...

Our entire culture has become about self, and individualism. We do not have the community, historical or racial binds that much of the rest of the world do, and the culture does not propagate the idea of looking out for each other, only "your own" be that your immediate family or subgroup. The technology we develop and trumpet is a bit of an application of Conway's Law.

Why stick Nest Founder in the headline, when Fadell's involvement in the iPod and iPhone are more pertinent to the article?

Because the only person who thinks Tony Fadell had any significant involvement with the iPhone is Tony Fadell.

The idea that "[a]t its root, this is a design problem" is frankly laughable.

Design, culture, and technology are deeply intertwined; society warps to fit its tools. As designers (remember, design thinking has antecedentally one foot in industrial design, one foot in programming functional requirements gathering), the creators of today's digital tools have essentially abdicated the responsibility of thinking about how their products change culture and what effects they have, positive or negative. Instead, we nod towards market forces and "fail fast" capitalism, which ends up justifying whatever cool toys we end up wanting to create.

I was disappointed when I realized it didn't say Nestle.

A thermostat?

Buried deep in the article (subheadline):

>one of the minds behind the iPod and the iPhone

So he/they did not run any supercomputer simulations of what their product would do to the world? You can bet their funders did.

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