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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 p

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.
uremog 11y ago
The people who complained suggest otherwise.
kevin_b_er 11y ago
"Philips Hue is based on ZigBee LightLink, a low-power, safe, and reliable technology to control your lights. New features and improvements are continuously added to the system to make it even more useful. Software and firmware updates can be done wirelessly and directly to your lights. The Philips Hue system can be easily integrated with other ZigBee-based systems for additional home automation." http://www2.meethue.com/en-gb/about-hue/what-hue-is/ http://www2.meethue.com/en-gb/about-hue/what-hue-is/ That phrase was up there before the DRM, during the DRM, and now after the DRM. So yes, they were advertising the functionality. They openly tested and added 3rd party bulbs to be controllable by the system in the past: https://twitter.com/tweethue/status/567368692452048896 https://twitter.com/tweethue/status/567368692452048896 They were advertising it and committing open actions to support 3rd party bulbs. The community interpreted their actions as shit rightfully.

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.

uremog 11y ago

The people who complained suggest otherwise.

kevin_b_er 11y ago

"Philips Hue is based on ZigBee LightLink, a low-power, safe, and reliable technology to control your lights. New features and improvements are continuously added to the system to make it even more useful. Software and firmware updates can be done wirelessly and directly to your lights. The Philips Hue system can be easily integrated with other ZigBee-based systems for additional home automation." http://www2.meethue.com/en-gb/about-hue/what-hue-is/ http://www2.meethue.com/en-gb/about-hue/what-hue-is/ That phrase was up there before the DRM, during the DRM, and now after the DRM. So yes, they were advertising the functionality. They openly tested and added 3rd party bulbs to be controllable by the system in the past: https://twitter.com/tweethue/status/567368692452048896 https://twitter.com/tweethue/status/567368692452048896 They were advertising it and committing open actions to support 3rd party bulbs. The community interpreted their actions as shit rightfully.