And the option is what, buy a Zigbee dongle and a raspberry pi run some code written by unpaid enthusiasts? 3D print a case for it and mount it on the wall, running updates and fixing it ever few months when some package update breaks it?
I like the concept of lights that run from an app. I don’t have any of the physical Hue switches for my system and it’s fine. But I do not want an app that abuses me, and I do not want to maintain some fragile project made from slapped together code. I want robust open hardware with open source software.
I’m convinced that we can achieve this, but it won’t be with the current model of business and engineering we have today.
I intentionally buy switches not bulbs or more complex gear. Then you plug your dirt cheap LED dumb bulb into the lamp and have it turn on and off with your voice. Much cheaper to replace when the bulb eventually burns too.
Its stupid simple, just make sure everything connects to your assistant of choice (Hey Google / Alexa / Siri - maybe?) OR just stay in one company's walled garden and you're fine. Personally I'm a fan of Wyze's hardware but don't use their apps or more complex cameras.
Google wants to have a word with you about some of the products it's sold and quickly killed.
Then they went public. This attracted a lot of new managers and ladder hoppers.
As a public company, the board, the C-Suite, the immense layers of management all were incentivized to boost stock prices to boost their own compensation.
They did this ethically during the low interest rate environment. But with higher interest rates, the only way to maintain growth is via scummy nickel and diming.
So execs and all the management layers do nothing but enshittify the product so that the gravy train can continue for at least a few more quarters.
Thus, customers are left hanging with shitty products.
Imo, the solution is to never buy long-term subscriptions from public companies with listed stocks, if possible.
I do get your point though. Fixing the lack of a privacy focused option that works well for people who aren't familiar with systems administration would be nice.
Where are all of the businesses with values that put humans first? Is it just necessary to be so ruthlessly destructive to make it at all?
That’s the other (mostly) good thing about… they’re Wi-Fi native and don’t use any sort of hub.
Their iOS app is reasonably decent, and there are honesceeen widgets.
Easy to build fairly advanced automations… for instance I have a rule that turns my bedside fan off and turns the bedroom lights on that runs 5 minutes before my alarm goes off, weekdays only.
Most of what I use are their bulbs, which are both relatively cheap ($30 for a 4 pack), with excellent CRI, variable color temp (including a nightshirt style automation that goes whiter during the day, and both warmer and dimmer at night), and full RGB color.
I probably wouldn’t recommend them for a whole home setup (you’d need pretty serious Wi-Fi routers) but for a case like mine where I’m only using it in a few rooms, it’s great.
Or they could just charge more for new bulbs as the bulbs burn out. Why ruin the user experience? Just charge me an extra dollar and move on.
Philips’ “managers” are screwing up many of their historic product lines and then discontinuing them when the margins go negative.
There are hundreds of people on this site that can begin creating a competing company/product line starting tomorrow if they care to.
It's exceptionally difficult, expensive, with a high risk of failure. And it'll properly take years of your life even if it fails. No small order for sure.
> Where are all of the businesses with values that put humans first?
A lot of them start out that way, while they're still founder owned/controlled. The enshittification is a market opening, if someone dares to pursue it.
That's risking losing you as a customer. Turns out, a lot of customers think our services are already too expensive.
The execs could easily argue that in their business judgement it’s in the shareholders best interests if they make a long term play, and chose to forego maximizing profits in the short term, and instead maintain positive customer goodwill in the interests of maximizing profits over a longer time span.
As long as they can provide some plausible reasoning behind their decision, they’re safe.
So, the “I have to maximize shareholder value” argument is… on the surface true, but hides a ton of autonomy and decision making power that the executives have.
The projected growth of revenue is not likely to materialize with higher interest rates. Investors will not invest in the stock as compared to the risk free 5% from US treasuries. So the stock will likely not grow any longer. More likely to flatline or collapse.
This makes the paper billionaire CEO a mere hundred millionaire, which is unacceptable.
Do you realize how insane this sounds for non-technical people who want to turn on a light in their livingroom?
You don't need the app if you're using Home Assistant, py-Kasa or something like that since the devices create their own WiFi network on first boot and you can program them from there.
I run 30+ Wi-Fi bulbs on an eero mesh. These devices are noisy but they are responsive (slower than zigbee). Only disadvantage is that they live or die by DHCP. If they can't renew their lease, it can take a while for them to come back online.
Don’t tell me she still manually SSHes to each box to run the apps in the background using nohup?!
> starting April 8, 2024 support will stop for Nest Secure
> stop support for Dropcam starting April 8, 2024.
> we will officially end Works with Nest as of September 29, 2023.
https://www.googlenestcommunity.com/t5/Blog/An-update-for-ou...
The government is not better at this than the market.
This is a lie.
Absolutely true. The more successful they are, the more likely they'll abuse their influence
(Not you and me, though, we have principles, right?)
Tim Cook got visibly angry at them, and told them that it was a core principle, and there was no way that Apple would compromise on it.
Say what you will about him, but he has personal reasons for valuing privacy, and he knows that compromising one core principle, in favor of profit, will inevitably lead to compromising customer information.
Looks like he made the right call. Apple is closing in on $3T.
Zigbee/Z-Wave plugs have been rock solid reliable.
The exact same thing you're complaining about :)
The alternative could be investors investing their capital responsibly, in companies with competent C-suites. That would be a nice trend to see. And I have some hope we might.
Actual reputable engineers leading engineering companies, doctors leading medical start-ups, career drivers leading car manufacturers, and so on. That is sustainable. I don’t get the infatuation investors have with the business class where even the most incompetent CEO with experience is often preferred to real competence of a specialist. That experience is available (and much cheaper!) through consulting contracts.
Investing in enshittification schemes is known in some circles as “shitting where you eat”, pardon the strong idiom. It harms the industry they’re trying to exploit for profit. It’s not only parasitic, but self-destructive.
I wonder if Tim Cook could get away with it if margins were slimmer, and Apple wasn't the most ludicrous cash making machine since Standard Oil.
Thats my worry, when Apple (and they very well may, who knows) takes a dive, eventually, at some point in the future, will they start selling off the farm?
USB is not the poster child for successful industry-led standards.
We talked about it when I was a student, more than 20 years ago, and it was always he same story: attempts at vendor lock down, a lack of standards, potential customers unconvinced.
Sometimes, exceptionally, something not too bad comes out, but it never lasts. I ended up installing regular light bulbs with regular light switches connected to the breaker panel.
I realize wifi might be the best of several bad options though.
That definitely exists and happens all the time
?? Driving around a lot doesn’t mean you know anything about manufacturing cars. You may have good inputs on what the interior design should be, but getting a team to build a million mile engine requires a different skill set.
https://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/LI/consCheck.cfm?...
That will never happen, the influence of money is always corrupting. There is no free market solution, these are things that have to be enforced by law.
Power delivery is wonky, but it’s pretty rare, bordering on never for me anyway, to plug in a peripheral and not have it just work.
The smart plugs that I use for fans have a physical push button
Every day billions of devices use USB for charging and data transfer and work just fine.. was there some government intervention that jumped in to make that work that I am unfamiliar with?
However the sausage was made.. and is still being made... may be imperfect and ugly but USB seems pretty darn successful!
Bluetooth too!
I do think the 1st party Google Home stuff is supported well enough, and I don't think any of Google's competitors in the smarthome space are really offering anything that's obviously more compelling. I mostly recommend people either go with big brands or something that can be flashed with tasmota, pick your poison.
Look at how well DNS, or TCP/IP is maintained, or Wikimedia is run
Plenty of companies do this. I'd wager most of the world economy consists of steady-state Mittelstand-esque firms that put out a good product with pride.
The problem is Silicon Valley's growth mindset was emulated broadly at a time when business history familiarity fell. (In part due to lower-level folks in Silicon Valley having a knee-jerk reaction to MBAs. In part due to said MBA programs deciding studying cases from a hundred years ago wasn't cutting edge.)
Growth is good. But trying to whip a business–that on its own will grow 2 or 3% a year and, with effort, 5 or 6%–to do 10 or 20% top-line YoY ruins it. The same way taking a growth business that could grow at 5 or 6% with effort, and instead committing to cutting its costs at 5% a year (the way one would do with a business that is in structural decline at a rate of 3 to 4% p.a.), is terrible strategy.
This is garbage management. It's bad for customers. It's bad for shareholders. It's bad for the societies whose technical knowledge is being eroded. It's good for a set of managers whose behavior veers between stupid and corrupt. I don't know the solution. But it's not as radical as overhauling corporate America in its entirety.
Apple’s Lightning has some of the worst connectors ever. I have about 5 USB-C cables and about 10 Lightning cables in my home. Each Lightning cable cost me more than 2x rhe most expensive USB-C cable bought from a convenience store and yet 4/5 of the Lightning cables have their wiring inside exposed while the USB-C ones could pass off as new.
The only issue I’ve ever had with a device on the USB-C side is 1 cable that is incapable of charging my wife’s macbook.
Guess how many of my Apple made Lightning cables are capable of charging my wife’s MacBook.
Under a certain angle, it's a win-win proposition!
We've got some colored lighting in the form of plain old LED strips with wired controllers, we've had a couple old fashioned single color bulbs at times, and there are other options like this: https://www.amazon.com/GE-Lighting-93100205-Replacement-Spec...
I'd really like to see something like openrgb (openrgb.org) for light bulbs though.
Also, there are tons of cheap colored lightbulbs controlled directly by an infrared remote. Example: https://www.amazon.com/Light-Color-Changing-2700K-White/dp/B...
I find the moralizing of these actions quite frustrating because they seem to indicate people don’t actually understand why things work the way do.
The C-suite aren’t corrupt. They have a job to do and they’re doing their job. Their job is to maximize returns on the investors’ investments. That’s it. It’s absolutely moral for them to do that job.
One might complain that their actions focus too much on the short term rather than the long term, and that would be a legitimate complaint. But only if it means they’re losing money in the long term. Enshittification usually makes money both in the short and long terms.
Once we recognize that people aren’t being “corrupt” but actually doing the job they’re being paid to do by maximizing their profits, one can focus on how to provide incentives to maximize profits without making things worse. And profit maximization inevitably leads to making things worse because it requires minimizing what you’re giving the customer and maximizing what you’re getting from them.
The free market check on this is competition. But competition only works if it’s a genuinely competitive market, and there are clear signals to the customer who is educated in understanding and valuing those signals, regarding the quality of products.
This used to be much easier earlier where products were simpler, but it’s much harder now. The vast majority of the market will have no ability to evaluate the risk of needing an online account to switch on your light bulb. And so a company which provides the no login option will be less competitive because it won’t be able to make money off your data and it will have to support an additional workflow.
In the absence of customer knowledge and visibility we only really have standards.
Ideally you start with standards provided by industry trade bodies. However, those are ripe for corruption and as a result there’s hardly any such successful standards.
Which leads you to the final option which is govt standards that are either highly encouraged by the threat of possibly instituting firmer regulations or just plain and simple regulated with the threat of fines and jail.
(Opinion) the only common denominator remaining is the underlying economic system.
This guy didn't care about his location data going to google either: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-tracked-his-bike...
He got screwed over big time. Thousands of dollars, just to avoid a jail cell.
There are uses of personal data that can be harmless, but once that data is in the hands of someone else you don't have any say in how it is used (harmless or otherwise) and even if the people using your data today aren't doing anything abusive with it, that data will live forever and you never know who will end up with it in the future or what they will do with it.
If the alternative is a subscription (assuming that actually means your data is not handed over to someone else) then at least you'll know what the cost of a product/service is, and you'll only pay for it while you're subscribed.
If you pay with your data, once it's out of your hands it can be used against you again and again at any time so you never get to stop "paying" and can never know what it will ultimately cost you.
As another example of getting screwed over, I've got a family member who bought a bluray of some movie in a shop, and then when she got home to play it found that her player refused because of DRM. The player wasn't connected to the internet and it needed to connect to a remote server in order to get permission to play her legally purchased media on her legally purchased player. She didn't understand what was happening and called me. The player didn't have wifi. The company sold a special USB wifi adapter at an insane price, otherwise she'd either have to move her furniture to take the player upstairs next to her modem and connect it physically, or run a very very long cable across her entire house.
The next time she needed a bluray player, she avoided the old brand, but didn't even check to see if it had wifi capability before buying (she got lucky and it did).
It probably is important to note that like many modern tech systems, they aren't "hands free" automation. Patches come out, things desync from the network, etc.
I use: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N106YN7 then connect the Leviton dimmer to Google Assistant for voice routines crossing different app gardens.
I don't use colored lights, but you could use smart bulbs or fixed colored lights controlled via smart plugs depending on your use case. Or just get something with built in multi color, like LED strips.
There are some LED strips that maintain programming thru powering off, just like how oil radiators with physical switches maintain settings thru powering off. These devices work great with smart plugs, and in the case of an oil radiator can be hooked up to a smart thermostat for a cheap man's smart home, fully portable for moving or apartment swapping.
I can do a longer write up if you're curious.
I never said it’s Silicon Valley’s fault. It’s the fault of managers emulating Silicon Valley in businesses that lack the underlying growth drivers.
> only common denominator remaining is the underlying economic system
If you ignore the corpus of counterfactuals I mentioned, sure. Blaming the entire economic system is a great way to stop marginal reforms. Perfect is the enemy of the good. (And in this case, it’s not perfection—it’s a utopia borne out of misreading the current economy as well as its history.)
You have my interest: what marginal reforms would prevent a multinational conglomerate from enshittifying lightbulbs? Would you change the management structure? The ownership structure? You’d think an huge institution with the momentum Philips has would be able to resist the kind of “growth hacking” this article is complaining about, but that’s empirically not the case. If you were god for a day how would you restructure Philips Hue? (I’m digging for a heartfelt rant because I really don’t have a good answer here.)
“Could get away with it” in terms of “would he be liable for a lawsuit for failing to meet the duty to shareholders”, probably not as long as he could article a reasonably justifiable reason his actions were in the shareholder interests, that isn’t directly contradicted by evidence.
“Could he get away with it” in terms of “would shareholders fire him?” maybe not. Depends on the shareholders, I guess.
Some of these districts _do_ have inspectors anyways, and they will issue permits, but the county itself does not require you to do this. As I said though, you will certainly be unable to insure anything you've built without a permit in these places. Aside from that, you can build what you want however you want.
It might not be happening at a large scale, but we are moving in that direction in recent years.
I’d remove sovereignty over the system from Philips. Consider mp3 or Arm. A balance of power. There the balance is between suppliers.
But let’s take the toughest case: you want to launch a system that users can trust long term, but you don’t have peer-level partners. (You also have executive authority at Philips.) First: divide standards writing from your corporate interests. You still want significant influence over the standard. But you want to remove the ability to make further changes unilaterally from your reports and successors. Universities are a natural partner in this; perhaps, also, a consumer-advocacy group. Second: give users clearly-defined and easily-marketed legal rights in respect of their devices.
The first added a public component to a limited section of your architecture. You’re not giving up profit, just control. (And future control, at that.) The second does threaten profits, but only in the long term; you’re leaning into management’s short-term profit incentives in both cases. Finally, to guard against the legal rights being curtailed by a future executive, build in a poison pill: if they’re reduced within certain parameters, certain IP becomes freely licenseable for repairs, et cetera. (I’d also add in engineering representation at the subsidiary’s Board level, perhaps with a separate ESOP package or whatever, but that’s likely more trouble than it’s worth.)
The above recapitulates the history of enlightened despots. Using absolute power to limit successors while giving balancing voices at the table. In Philips case, there was no ecosystem. No third-party developers of note. Users in insufficient numbers and organisation to pressure management. Betting on humans being good for goodness’ sake is a terrible philosophy, irrespective of how they’re organised.
And dare I say, had they done the above and created an ecosystem where they were a major—but not the dominant—player, there is a good chance I’d have their product in my house right now. By choosing a non-aligned model, Philips lost long-term value, both by sacrificing revenue and assuming the entire network’s development cost.