12 ms·

Philips reverses decision to close the Hue Platform

441 points by alaaf 11y ago

sismoc 11y ago
I won't be so quick to "roll-back" my decision to boycott their products.
- gnulnx 11y ago
  Hey, give them some credit. They listened to their customers and responded very quickly.
  - sspiff 11y ago
    Exactly this. Their management / decision makers aren't familiar with the hacker mindset, but they responded to public criticism quickly by acquiescing to the demands. I don't so anything bad about this. They mad a public about face, admitting that their decision was not the right one for their audience, and changed it. That's not easy to do for most people, let alone companies.
    - lightbritefight 11y ago
      They didnt really admit the decision was bad for the audience. They said "well, we were just looking out for you, and highly recommend you doing what we want, but I guess you can do that too, but you shouldnt." The tone is very much "we did nothing wrong." I don't expect more, but I was hoping for it.
      - jhall1468 11y ago
        I disagree. The tone was more akin to "This really doesn't impact a lot of our customers, but the customers it did impact caused a significant (unexpected) response." That's perfectly valid. They felt that it was a minority doing it (which is probably true) so this would be a non-issue. It wasn't, so they reversed it.
- imtringued 11y ago
  Are you trying to say that reversing their decision was a mistake?
sneak 11y ago
The funny part is that they claim to have broken their customers' previously working functionality in good faith. Who writes these things, and why do their supervisors allow them to keep working there?!?
- reustle 11y ago
  Well their supervisors probably help write these things...
- eveningcoffee 11y ago
  I guess that's today spin doctors from PR department.
- Gracana 11y ago
  It could be worse: "Some customers were involved in a darkness-related incident."
  - Brian-Puccio 11y ago
    I'm not sure if this is a specific reference to something like McSweeney's Interactive Guide to Ambiguous Grammar [0], to something else, or just a comment in general. (But I agree.) [0] http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-interactive-guide-to-ambiguous-grammar http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-interactive-guide-to-a...
themartorana 11y ago
Wow. Most companies are deaf to user outrage. The original decision wasn't fantastic, but I understand the whole "Friends of..." certification route. At least in the future they'll be able to stick to "if it's not certified by us..." for customer support, which was likely the original impetus (along with a desire to cut off cheap alternatives to their devices). I'm not mad at this at all.
- eveningcoffee 11y ago
  I'm not mad at this at all. I am. Because it is a way to extort money out of other ZigBee participants.
  - themartorana 11y ago
    Sure, that's fair. But from their standpoint it's a bit "damned if you do, damned if you don't." This is conjecture, but I imagine supporting cheaper third-party devices is becoming a headache. In the last thread about this, a former ZigBee developer noted how difficult it was to code to the platform. It may not all be evil.
    - eveningcoffee 11y ago
      But from their standpoint it's a bit "damned if you do, damned if you don't." No, it is not. They have two options - have their own standard or support other ZigBee devices. This has not been a problem with another similar standards like KNX. but I imagine supporting cheaper third-party devices is becoming a headache It is not about supporting some cheap third-party devices but other ZigBee devices that Philips claims to support.
  - rubidium 11y ago
    It's not extorting. It's making sure your house doesn't burn down because you bought the el cheapo bulb from knockoff brand C.
    - rrrx3 11y ago
ohitsdom 11y ago
"We underestimated the impact this would have upon the small number of our customers" Do they really believe it is a small number of customers that use non-Philips light bulbs? I mean, good for them in reversing the decision, but the damage is already done (check out Amazon reviews for one) and it should have been easily foreseen.
- joezydeco 11y ago
  Translation: "we'll do this to shut up the pro users that are generating all this bad P/R, and it really doesn't matter since 99.9% of our customers won't care about this anyway." Can't say I disagree with the idea. Everyone wants a system like this to be open on principle, but in reality it won't really get used that much. This stuff is still too hard for the average consumer.
  - soylentcola 11y ago
    I dunno. I bought a Hue starter kit (hub+3 bulbs) and three more bulbs when I moved into my new house. I wanted something cool and "gadgety" to set up in the new place. They've generally been OK but I haven't bought any more bulbs since that first setup two years ago. This is mainly because the Hue bulbs are quite pricey and I've had a couple of them semi-fail (some colors in the spectrum stop working due to the blue LEDs crapping out). I've been keeping an eye out for compatible bulbs that are a bit more affordable since Hue prices haven't dropped at all and I'm more likely to drop $20-30 on a fancy bulb than another $60 when they can still fail. Granted, I've already got the hub so they have my money. Their risk is that I only buy third party bulbs instead of Hue bulbs from now on. Still, the next time I go to buy more lamps to expand my setup, if there are less expensive options that are reasonably equivalent, I'll buy them instead anyway. If Hue lamps become more affordable, I'll stick to first-party by default. But if Hues are still $60 each and some other platform starts selling good RGB LED bulbs for $15-25 each (and Hue has locked out third party bulbs), I'll just drop Hue in general and cut my losses.
    - jon-wood 11y ago
      I got a couple of the OSRAM RGB bulbs a while back, and while they're not quite as good as the Hue ones at half the price they were definitely the right choice. The only really issue I have is that their colours don't match the Hue ones, so it can be a bit hit and miss getting what you're looking for.
DiabloD3 11y ago
The thing is, to me, the fact that they ever decided to do this in the first place means I will never buy Philips smart home products ever. They have proven they can't be trusted with this sort of power, and that is a one way trip. You don't come back from that, you don't get back off my list.
- rubidium 11y ago
  Either A) You don't trust any large, publically traded company. B) You don't understand how large, publically traded companies work. This decision was made by someone in marketing. Phillips engineers (in this division) were ambivalent because it meant less verification and testing (yea!) but also means they have a less capable product. It got approved because someone (likely a director somewhere) put together a market strategy that showed they could make x dollars in the next 2 years doing this. Public backlash was bigger than expected. VP gets involved. Decision is changed.
  - Steltek 11y ago
    I don't think you've invalidated his point at all. It's not about why this happened, it's that it happened at all. Apathetic, poor decision making can be just as bad as greedy, poor decision making. Sometimes people need a reminder that corporations are not your friends and investing too much trust is a risky choice.
    - rubidium 11y ago
      My goal wasn't to invalidate. It was to say that the grandparent must not trust any large, publicly traded company. Which is exactly your final sentence. However, I would say that a company (big or small) that actually changes their strategic marketing decision based on a user complaints _is_ rare. And this shows that Phillips has some good mechanisms in place to respond. To me, they come out a bit ahead at the end of this.
  - rrrx3 11y ago
    The decision to only support Philips products came most likely from the engineering division themselves. Marketing probably had a shit-fit because losing a marketable feature is a giant regression to your general user. People in Marketing and Product tend to be way more in-tune with customers and don't make boneheaded decisions like this. Another easy tell: the company was shocked by the reaction of users. That meant the company wasn't aware of user impressions of the decision. That also meant Product/Marketing teams weren't involved in the decision. When the "what does it cost us to test this compatibility" calculus comes out as more expensive than "what is the cost of the backlash to our company," you realize that Engineering divisions without enough resources are driving this type of decision, 99 times out of 100.
donkeyd 11y ago
Second large company this week to rollback a change after public outcry, with Valve rolling back a change in CS:GO. I hope their marketing people take a lesson out of this.
- thecatspaw 11y ago
  if only valve would listen more often and faster. Im not demanding fixes the next day, but it would be nice to at least get some message saying "We know about this issue, we're looking into it"
mdip 11y ago
I'm glad to see they've reversed the decision. It was the only reasonable choice they had with such an immature market that could have them dethroned as the leader very quickly. Their reasons for lock-in made no sense. For a product like this compatibility is a feature and many people chose the Philips products because of the ecosystem of compatible products available, the ZigBee protocol and third-party light bulbs. I'm sure that third-party products were causing problems, however, wholesale blocking of them via software update is a terrible solution. They, literally, turned out the lights on their customers. Meanwhile, I'd be willing to bet support costs immediately spiked -- people call support when things don't work and they just pushed out a solution that increased rather than decreased that. Unfortunately, I think they've bruised their reputation quite a bit with this move. It's now delayed my purchase of such a product until I am convinced that they have a solid third-party certification program in place (with very low licensing fees) or (even better) a guarantee with the product that they won't try this again when the market is more mature and they have the option of ignoring complaining customers. Their competitors could see a rise in sales by taking advantage of this blunder and committing to open protocols. I haven't looked at the landscape in this category, yet, and had just assumed I'd be buying the Philips Hue eventually, but they've motivated me to do more research.
- pkgapkg 11y ago
  Their move concerned me, because now I don't know if this is "we won't close our ecosystem" or "we won't close our ecosystem YET". I don't feel like waking up and discovering that they've decided that they now have enough market share to be abusive and controlling. Most of my existing ZigBee stuff isn't as slick as the Hue stuff, but I know it won't get turned off. I get that people make mistakes, but their original move showed that Philips has essentially NO understanding of their market, and that they are willing to casually engage in extraordinary hostility towards their customers. This isn't a winning combination.
mdip 11y ago
A point brought up in the replies to their forum post warrants repeating: They claim that they were concerned about the quality of their brand being eroded by third-party bulbs that didn't reproduce the same quality experience that first-party/certified bulbs did. They had the solution available to them from day one. Since they can clearly identify third-party bulbs, they could have simply presented a warning along the lines of "We've detected you're using bulbs that are not certified by Philips. For best results, we recommend using only certified bulbs (link to purchase here) and cannot guarantee a quality experience with the bulbs you've purchased. Click "OK" to continue."
- eli 11y ago
  Will that stop people complaining to Philips support when it doesn't work well?
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    The only real solution to this is to go Google way and just refuse to have any support altogether. Otherwise you can't really stop people calling in with absurd requests. It's a general rule in all consumer sales - the smarter / more savvy a customer is, the less likely is that he'll be calling.
    - JoBrad 11y ago
      I don't know that this model will work for consumer hardware. Hue isn't marketed as a "dumb" lightbulb, and people aren't going to appreciate paying more for less service than they get with a 100w incandescent.
- dalbin 11y ago
  That's exactly the solution used by Apple, so you can still use DIY HomeKit accessory. https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/HomeKitDeveloperGuide/Art/add_accessory_dialog1_2x.png https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Networ...
- culturestate 11y ago
anc84 11y ago
They can still control it and reverse the reversal in the future. You are at their whim. It is not user-friendly unless it is free software (and hardware). Amazon can still remotely remove books and no one bats an eye. This is just an issue because at the moment these kinds of home automation are per-dominantly "nerd" territory while e-book readers are already mainstream.
- fastball 11y ago
  Where is this magical place where I can find free hardware?
  - stefs 11y ago
    To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer”.
    - umanwizard 11y ago
      GP's point still stands. Open hardware is very rare.
HarryHirsch 11y ago
Compare this with Ethernet. You plug it in - and it just works. No 3com/Realtek/Intel certification required. As a user I may be shielded, but I believe there are no interoperability issues between Cisco/Juniper/Brocade switchgear either. With this as the background, it's surprising to see a large crowd defending the equivalent of Ford-branded gasoline.
- fastball 11y ago
  Apples and oranges. Pure hardware is a lot easier to make compatible consistently than hardware+software.
  - CydeWeys 11y ago
    Huh? There's a lot of software involved in wired networking. Way more than for lightbulbs, I'd suspect. And yet they all interoperate via open standards, and any vendor that tried to sell equipment that only worked with their own equipment would be laughed at of the market.
    - throwaway2048 11y ago
      Welcome to the new normal, where everything is a walled garden and a 'platform'. Pushed publicly for bullshit and spurious reasons, but privately is all about profit and control.
    - fastball 11y ago
      An ethernet cable does not contain any software. A smart lightbulb does.
      - CydeWeys 11y ago
        But now you've drawn an irrelevant comparison. The power line and socket that the smart lightbulb is connected to don't contain any software. Those are the parts that are analogous to a simple Ethernet wire (which is really just eight separate leads instead of three). The smart lightbulb itself is analogous to a router.
toppy 11y ago
How many developers does it take to change Philips lightbulb?
revelation 11y ago
Not sure why people are screaming "boycott". Philips never advertised their system as being compatible with third-party lights. The fact that they use an open protocol to communicate with their own lights doesn't change this. It's like connecting to your office chat with an IRC client because you figured out that's what they are using under the hood. Why would you scream bloody murder when one day your IRC client stops being compatible with it? They never advertised this to begin with! You can't exactly demand functionality that you were never sold.
- HelloNurse 11y ago
  Not bothering to test and actively support devices from other vendors would be reasonable, but customers have the expectation that a product does a decent effort to respect the standard; whitelisting a subset of Philips lightbulbs and deliberately refusing to work with anything else means giving users a bad product for the sake of anticompetitive business practices. This kind of deliberate, obviously harmful abuse is worse than merely reckless behaviour like the Superfish scandal or the Windows 10 update that uninstalls user software.
  - revelation 11y ago
    Except I don't think Philips advertised that they are using an open standard. It's just what they used for the implementation. They are free to mutilate that standard as they see fit for their own product, and since they didn't make it into a selling point, there is no reason for them to expect compatibility.
    - HelloNurse 11y ago
      In the world of customers who prefer trustworthy vendors, there's a substantial difference between not wanting to spend money to respect a standard any more than advertised, and deliberately spending money (firmware updates aren't free) to worsen the product and screw customers. Likewise, "mutilating" a standard to leverage standard technology in a not-really-standard product isn't the same as deliberate artificial incompatibility for purely commercial reasons.
nichochar 11y ago
I really respect philips for having the humility to come back on a decision like this. As someone who already owns hue and has bought into the ecosystem, this makes me want to promote their brand further, and I will. Hat down to whoever made this happen over there! The world is better when things are open.
Nilef 11y ago
Any recommendations for third-party lights?
- jerrysievert 11y ago
  the GE Link bulbs are pretty nice. they have a great hue (pun actually not intended).
tomlongson 11y ago
I wonder if this had anything to do with the flood of negative comments to their Amazon product pages? 3/5 stars: http://www.amazon.com/Philips-455303-White-Starter-Generation/dp/B014H2OZAC/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1450292147&sr=8-2&keywords=philips+hue+hub http://www.amazon.com/Philips-455303-White-Starter-Generatio... 4/5 stars (previously 4.5/5): http://www.amazon.com/Philips-456210-Ambiance-Starter-Generation/dp/B014H2P4KW/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1450292147&sr=8-3&keywords=philips+hue+hub http://www.amazon.com/Philips-456210-Ambiance-Starter-Genera...
vilts 11y ago
Sounds exactly like the FTDI FT232 "serial killer" saga all over again. They got many people very pissed off and probably never buying or building products with their chips again.
josscrowcroft 11y ago
"We fucked up, but we don't want to admit it."
gedrap 11y ago
A lot of the people are talking about how important integration and interoperability is. I agree with it, however, a lot of work has to be done to achieve it. In order to do it properly, there should be standards that major providers agree upon making integration much easier and predictable. That takes plenty of time. Then you probably need some walled garden to control the experience. Approved apps, approved 3rd party providers, etc. If some crappy app is released, regular users won't blame the developer but the platform, as it was discussed in great details in other threads. We need to get out of the HN bubble. Seriously. We forget that a computer is a device to watch porn and browse facebook and that's about it for A LOT of people. Chances are, it will cause a wave of anger in communities such as this one (where there's a strong sentiment for open systems). This work has to be done be a number of large providers (read: long processes) and followed by startups popping up and disappearing now and then. This stuff always takes time.

441 points by alaaf 11y ago

sismoc 11y ago

I won't be so quick to "roll-back" my decision to boycott their products.

gnulnx 11y ago
Hey, give them some credit. They listened to their customers and responded very quickly.
- sspiff 11y ago
  Exactly this. Their management / decision makers aren't familiar with the hacker mindset, but they responded to public criticism quickly by acquiescing to the demands. I don't so anything bad about this. They mad a public about face, admitting that their decision was not the right one for their audience, and changed it. That's not easy to do for most people, let alone companies.
  - lightbritefight 11y ago
    They didnt really admit the decision was bad for the audience. They said "well, we were just looking out for you, and highly recommend you doing what we want, but I guess you can do that too, but you shouldnt." The tone is very much "we did nothing wrong." I don't expect more, but I was hoping for it.
    - jhall1468 11y ago
      I disagree. The tone was more akin to "This really doesn't impact a lot of our customers, but the customers it did impact caused a significant (unexpected) response." That's perfectly valid. They felt that it was a minority doing it (which is probably true) so this would be a non-issue. It wasn't, so they reversed it.
imtringued 11y ago
Are you trying to say that reversing their decision was a mistake?

sneak 11y ago

The funny part is that they claim to have broken their customers' previously working functionality in good faith. Who writes these things, and why do their supervisors allow them to keep working there?!?

reustle 11y ago
Well their supervisors probably help write these things...
eveningcoffee 11y ago
I guess that's today spin doctors from PR department.
Gracana 11y ago
It could be worse: "Some customers were involved in a darkness-related incident."
- Brian-Puccio 11y ago
  I'm not sure if this is a specific reference to something like McSweeney's Interactive Guide to Ambiguous Grammar [0], to something else, or just a comment in general. (But I agree.) [0] http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-interactive-guide-to-ambiguous-grammar http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-interactive-guide-to-a...

themartorana 11y ago

Wow. Most companies are deaf to user outrage. The original decision wasn't fantastic, but I understand the whole "Friends of..." certification route. At least in the future they'll be able to stick to "if it's not certified by us..." for customer support, which was likely the original impetus (along with a desire to cut off cheap alternatives to their devices). I'm not mad at this at all.

eveningcoffee 11y ago
I'm not mad at this at all. I am. Because it is a way to extort money out of other ZigBee participants.
- themartorana 11y ago
  Sure, that's fair. But from their standpoint it's a bit "damned if you do, damned if you don't." This is conjecture, but I imagine supporting cheaper third-party devices is becoming a headache. In the last thread about this, a former ZigBee developer noted how difficult it was to code to the platform. It may not all be evil.
  - eveningcoffee 11y ago
    But from their standpoint it's a bit "damned if you do, damned if you don't." No, it is not. They have two options - have their own standard or support other ZigBee devices. This has not been a problem with another similar standards like KNX. but I imagine supporting cheaper third-party devices is becoming a headache It is not about supporting some cheap third-party devices but other ZigBee devices that Philips claims to support.
- rubidium 11y ago
  It's not extorting. It's making sure your house doesn't burn down because you bought the el cheapo bulb from knockoff brand C.
  - rrrx3 11y ago

ohitsdom 11y ago

"We underestimated the impact this would have upon the small number of our customers" Do they really believe it is a small number of customers that use non-Philips light bulbs? I mean, good for them in reversing the decision, but the damage is already done (check out Amazon reviews for one) and it should have been easily foreseen.

joezydeco 11y ago
Translation: "we'll do this to shut up the pro users that are generating all this bad P/R, and it really doesn't matter since 99.9% of our customers won't care about this anyway." Can't say I disagree with the idea. Everyone wants a system like this to be open on principle, but in reality it won't really get used that much. This stuff is still too hard for the average consumer.
- soylentcola 11y ago
  I dunno. I bought a Hue starter kit (hub+3 bulbs) and three more bulbs when I moved into my new house. I wanted something cool and "gadgety" to set up in the new place. They've generally been OK but I haven't bought any more bulbs since that first setup two years ago. This is mainly because the Hue bulbs are quite pricey and I've had a couple of them semi-fail (some colors in the spectrum stop working due to the blue LEDs crapping out). I've been keeping an eye out for compatible bulbs that are a bit more affordable since Hue prices haven't dropped at all and I'm more likely to drop $20-30 on a fancy bulb than another $60 when they can still fail. Granted, I've already got the hub so they have my money. Their risk is that I only buy third party bulbs instead of Hue bulbs from now on. Still, the next time I go to buy more lamps to expand my setup, if there are less expensive options that are reasonably equivalent, I'll buy them instead anyway. If Hue lamps become more affordable, I'll stick to first-party by default. But if Hues are still $60 each and some other platform starts selling good RGB LED bulbs for $15-25 each (and Hue has locked out third party bulbs), I'll just drop Hue in general and cut my losses.
  - jon-wood 11y ago
    I got a couple of the OSRAM RGB bulbs a while back, and while they're not quite as good as the Hue ones at half the price they were definitely the right choice. The only really issue I have is that their colours don't match the Hue ones, so it can be a bit hit and miss getting what you're looking for.

DiabloD3 11y ago

The thing is, to me, the fact that they ever decided to do this in the first place means I will never buy Philips smart home products ever. They have proven they can't be trusted with this sort of power, and that is a one way trip. You don't come back from that, you don't get back off my list.

rubidium 11y ago
Either A) You don't trust any large, publically traded company. B) You don't understand how large, publically traded companies work. This decision was made by someone in marketing. Phillips engineers (in this division) were ambivalent because it meant less verification and testing (yea!) but also means they have a less capable product. It got approved because someone (likely a director somewhere) put together a market strategy that showed they could make x dollars in the next 2 years doing this. Public backlash was bigger than expected. VP gets involved. Decision is changed.
- Steltek 11y ago
  I don't think you've invalidated his point at all. It's not about why this happened, it's that it happened at all. Apathetic, poor decision making can be just as bad as greedy, poor decision making. Sometimes people need a reminder that corporations are not your friends and investing too much trust is a risky choice.
  - rubidium 11y ago
    My goal wasn't to invalidate. It was to say that the grandparent must not trust any large, publicly traded company. Which is exactly your final sentence. However, I would say that a company (big or small) that actually changes their strategic marketing decision based on a user complaints _is_ rare. And this shows that Phillips has some good mechanisms in place to respond. To me, they come out a bit ahead at the end of this.
- rrrx3 11y ago
  The decision to only support Philips products came most likely from the engineering division themselves. Marketing probably had a shit-fit because losing a marketable feature is a giant regression to your general user. People in Marketing and Product tend to be way more in-tune with customers and don't make boneheaded decisions like this. Another easy tell: the company was shocked by the reaction of users. That meant the company wasn't aware of user impressions of the decision. That also meant Product/Marketing teams weren't involved in the decision. When the "what does it cost us to test this compatibility" calculus comes out as more expensive than "what is the cost of the backlash to our company," you realize that Engineering divisions without enough resources are driving this type of decision, 99 times out of 100.

donkeyd 11y ago

Second large company this week to rollback a change after public outcry, with Valve rolling back a change in CS:GO. I hope their marketing people take a lesson out of this.

thecatspaw 11y ago
if only valve would listen more often and faster. Im not demanding fixes the next day, but it would be nice to at least get some message saying "We know about this issue, we're looking into it"

mdip 11y ago

I'm glad to see they've reversed the decision. It was the only reasonable choice they had with such an immature market that could have them dethroned as the leader very quickly. Their reasons for lock-in made no sense. For a product like this compatibility is a feature and many people chose the Philips products because of the ecosystem of compatible products available, the ZigBee protocol and third-party light bulbs. I'm sure that third-party products were causing problems, however, wholesale blocking of them via software update is a terrible solution. They, literally, turned out the lights on their customers. Meanwhile, I'd be willing to bet support costs immediately spiked -- people call support when things don't work and they just pushed out a solution that increased rather than decreased that. Unfortunately, I think they've bruised their reputation quite a bit with this move. It's now delayed my purchase of such a product until I am convinced that they have a solid third-party certification program in place (with very low licensing fees) or (even better) a guarantee with the product that they won't try this again when the market is more mature and they have the option of ignoring complaining customers. Their competitors could see a rise in sales by taking advantage of this blunder and committing to open protocols. I haven't looked at the landscape in this category, yet, and had just assumed I'd be buying the Philips Hue eventually, but they've motivated me to do more research.

pkgapkg 11y ago
Their move concerned me, because now I don't know if this is "we won't close our ecosystem" or "we won't close our ecosystem YET". I don't feel like waking up and discovering that they've decided that they now have enough market share to be abusive and controlling. Most of my existing ZigBee stuff isn't as slick as the Hue stuff, but I know it won't get turned off. I get that people make mistakes, but their original move showed that Philips has essentially NO understanding of their market, and that they are willing to casually engage in extraordinary hostility towards their customers. This isn't a winning combination.

mdip 11y ago

A point brought up in the replies to their forum post warrants repeating: They claim that they were concerned about the quality of their brand being eroded by third-party bulbs that didn't reproduce the same quality experience that first-party/certified bulbs did. They had the solution available to them from day one. Since they can clearly identify third-party bulbs, they could have simply presented a warning along the lines of "We've detected you're using bulbs that are not certified by Philips. For best results, we recommend using only certified bulbs (link to purchase here) and cannot guarantee a quality experience with the bulbs you've purchased. Click "OK" to continue."

eli 11y ago
Will that stop people complaining to Philips support when it doesn't work well?
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  The only real solution to this is to go Google way and just refuse to have any support altogether. Otherwise you can't really stop people calling in with absurd requests. It's a general rule in all consumer sales - the smarter / more savvy a customer is, the less likely is that he'll be calling.
  - JoBrad 11y ago
    I don't know that this model will work for consumer hardware. Hue isn't marketed as a "dumb" lightbulb, and people aren't going to appreciate paying more for less service than they get with a 100w incandescent.
dalbin 11y ago
That's exactly the solution used by Apple, so you can still use DIY HomeKit accessory. https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/HomeKitDeveloperGuide/Art/add_accessory_dialog1_2x.png https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Networ...
culturestate 11y ago

anc84 11y ago

They can still control it and reverse the reversal in the future. You are at their whim. It is not user-friendly unless it is free software (and hardware). Amazon can still remotely remove books and no one bats an eye. This is just an issue because at the moment these kinds of home automation are per-dominantly "nerd" territory while e-book readers are already mainstream.

fastball 11y ago
Where is this magical place where I can find free hardware?
- stefs 11y ago
  To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer”.
  - umanwizard 11y ago
    GP's point still stands. Open hardware is very rare.

HarryHirsch 11y ago

Compare this with Ethernet. You plug it in - and it just works. No 3com/Realtek/Intel certification required. As a user I may be shielded, but I believe there are no interoperability issues between Cisco/Juniper/Brocade switchgear either. With this as the background, it's surprising to see a large crowd defending the equivalent of Ford-branded gasoline.

fastball 11y ago
Apples and oranges. Pure hardware is a lot easier to make compatible consistently than hardware+software.
- CydeWeys 11y ago
  Huh? There's a lot of software involved in wired networking. Way more than for lightbulbs, I'd suspect. And yet they all interoperate via open standards, and any vendor that tried to sell equipment that only worked with their own equipment would be laughed at of the market.
  - throwaway2048 11y ago
    Welcome to the new normal, where everything is a walled garden and a 'platform'. Pushed publicly for bullshit and spurious reasons, but privately is all about profit and control.
  - fastball 11y ago
    An ethernet cable does not contain any software. A smart lightbulb does.
    - CydeWeys 11y ago
      But now you've drawn an irrelevant comparison. The power line and socket that the smart lightbulb is connected to don't contain any software. Those are the parts that are analogous to a simple Ethernet wire (which is really just eight separate leads instead of three). The smart lightbulb itself is analogous to a router.

toppy 11y ago

How many developers does it take to change Philips lightbulb?

revelation 11y ago

Not sure why people are screaming "boycott". Philips never advertised their system as being compatible with third-party lights. The fact that they use an open protocol to communicate with their own lights doesn't change this. It's like connecting to your office chat with an IRC client because you figured out that's what they are using under the hood. Why would you scream bloody murder when one day your IRC client stops being compatible with it? They never advertised this to begin with! You can't exactly demand functionality that you were never sold.

HelloNurse 11y ago
Not bothering to test and actively support devices from other vendors would be reasonable, but customers have the expectation that a product does a decent effort to respect the standard; whitelisting a subset of Philips lightbulbs and deliberately refusing to work with anything else means giving users a bad product for the sake of anticompetitive business practices. This kind of deliberate, obviously harmful abuse is worse than merely reckless behaviour like the Superfish scandal or the Windows 10 update that uninstalls user software.
- revelation 11y ago
  Except I don't think Philips advertised that they are using an open standard. It's just what they used for the implementation. They are free to mutilate that standard as they see fit for their own product, and since they didn't make it into a selling point, there is no reason for them to expect compatibility.
  - HelloNurse 11y ago
    In the world of customers who prefer trustworthy vendors, there's a substantial difference between not wanting to spend money to respect a standard any more than advertised, and deliberately spending money (firmware updates aren't free) to worsen the product and screw customers. Likewise, "mutilating" a standard to leverage standard technology in a not-really-standard product isn't the same as deliberate artificial incompatibility for purely commercial reasons.

nichochar 11y ago

I really respect philips for having the humility to come back on a decision like this. As someone who already owns hue and has bought into the ecosystem, this makes me want to promote their brand further, and I will. Hat down to whoever made this happen over there! The world is better when things are open.

Nilef 11y ago

Any recommendations for third-party lights?

jerrysievert 11y ago
the GE Link bulbs are pretty nice. they have a great hue (pun actually not intended).

tomlongson 11y ago

I wonder if this had anything to do with the flood of negative comments to their Amazon product pages? 3/5 stars: http://www.amazon.com/Philips-455303-White-Starter-Generation/dp/B014H2OZAC/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1450292147&sr=8-2&keywords=philips+hue+hub http://www.amazon.com/Philips-455303-White-Starter-Generatio... 4/5 stars (previously 4.5/5): http://www.amazon.com/Philips-456210-Ambiance-Starter-Generation/dp/B014H2P4KW/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1450292147&sr=8-3&keywords=philips+hue+hub http://www.amazon.com/Philips-456210-Ambiance-Starter-Genera...

vilts 11y ago

Sounds exactly like the FTDI FT232 "serial killer" saga all over again. They got many people very pissed off and probably never buying or building products with their chips again.

josscrowcroft 11y ago

"We fucked up, but we don't want to admit it."

gedrap 11y ago

A lot of the people are talking about how important integration and interoperability is. I agree with it, however, a lot of work has to be done to achieve it. In order to do it properly, there should be standards that major providers agree upon making integration much easier and predictable. That takes plenty of time. Then you probably need some walled garden to control the experience. Approved apps, approved 3rd party providers, etc. If some crappy app is released, regular users won't blame the developer but the platform, as it was discussed in great details in other threads. We need to get out of the HN bubble. Seriously. We forget that a computer is a device to watch porn and browse facebook and that's about it for A LOT of people. Chances are, it will cause a wave of anger in communities such as this one (where there's a strong sentiment for open systems). This work has to be done be a number of large providers (read: long processes) and followed by startups popping up and disappearing now and then. This stuff always takes time.