Hacker News Reader

Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

Discontinuing the product is one thing, but intentionally bricking the existing ones (and leaving it up to the former owners to dispose of the resulting e-waste) seems uncalled for to me.

View on HN

These devices are heavily dependent on software running on servers in Amazon's cloud. They're being bricked only because those servers are being turned off because continuing to maintain the server software would be expensive and not to Amazon's gain.

Maintaining it wouldn't sell more of this specific product, but simply shutting it down damages their reputation far beyond those directly impacted.

Indeed. I recently inherited a bunch of Amazon stock, and I sold it a few days ago because I just don't have much confidence in the way Amazon operates. Decisions like these (releasing products that are not profitable, bricking products shortly after release, etc.) make me think that the company is being poorly managed.

Does it?

Google shuts stuff down left and right and nobody seems to be leaving.

> and nobody seems to be leaving

I don't think you're right about that

I'd love to believe they were, but are they? I haven't seen anything to indicate that.

They just stopped buying more stuff from Google? All the products that people use are ones that have existed for years.

I did.

I used to pay for their stuff, but I have moved to Seafile and Fastmail. Only google product I still use is YouTube, everything else has been replaced and I don't consider new Google products anymore.

Google constantly shutting things down is precisely why I stopped using Firebase. I can't trust them

They didn't "simply shut it off", they gave everyone a full refund + $300 voucher.

And I guess they sold so few that this just made more sense to refund everyone than keeping maintaining the servers.

An invite only product with extremely meager sales realized to have been about as worthwhile as a brick being fully refunded with $300 extra plus cost of recycling covered may not be a hacker's utopia but seems like a pretty good option to me. Much better than imagining any of these businesses were going to hack the failed gear into something useful instead.

> and leaving it up to the former owners to dispose of the resulting e-waste

"Amazon's email to customers encourages owners to recycle Astro for Business through the Amazon Recycling Program, with Amazon covering associated costs."

I wonder how much we're rushing to defend the three businesses that bought a total of 10 of them, most of them connected to Amazon anyhow, or some similar number.

I have a hard time imagining Amazon is so much as shutting down 1000 devices here.

Seems it requires cloud services, so once Amazon shuts these down it’s as good as bricked. Otherwise they have to run the cloud forever, or reprogram them not to need cloud.

I had a cat feeder that required cloud, and when that company went out of business I had a brick and no refund. (Yeah I was crazy to buy the thing, but I had my reasons and knew the risks.) That’s the risk with these cloudy devices.

It's always sad when a small startup like Amazon doesn't have the resources to keep a couple servers running and updated. If only some company invented some kind of service to make that kind of thing easier.

They are taking the devices back for recycling.

Business opportunity to provide a service to reprogram them for non-cloud use.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com