Thanks for creating Dropcam - I still love the device even with the Nest "improvements."
I also worked at Nest (on the thermostat product) and couldn't echo your comments more strongly.
Tony Fadell is a terrible manager. There are so many public data points at this point: the perma 6 day work weeks, the "f* being Googly" comment at the all hands, refusing to allow Nest employees to have the Google massage benefits because "they don't deserve it", and now, throwing a great team under the bus to hide his inability to manage. I have another twenty that I can't share because of confidentiality and I'm sure you do as well.
The fact that Alphabet/Google hasn't replaced him is a horribly disappointing statement about what they think is most important: profit, not employees, not culture. Or maybe not even profit after your comments. :(
Please do write the other story about your acquisition when you can - a lot of people here could learn a lot from it as a cautionary tale.
They've made some really neat products. I'm always surprised how many product and business leaders in the world are harsh/aggressive, you just don't hear about them because smaller footprints. It's easy to tear down success and innovation without context of redemptive outcomes/tradeoffs. Turn your frustration into energy and go innovate.
I can't fathom having to do that at a salaried job and staying for more than two weeks. Unless they were paying me an obscene amount of money, but even then, I'd probably be on the look out for something better.
Lol I'm always horrified when I read what it's like for them. I feel like almost every other kind of developer is well paid and appreciated, yet for some reason game devs seem to always be overworked, underpaid and underappreciated with no job security. Maybe it's because more people want to work in the game industry?
I'd rather have a well paying dev job with reasonable hours, and work on games in my own time.
Many more people want to work in the game industry. Very few people dream of creating CRUD apps some day.
Also, the pipeline and recruiting is set up for it. Places like Full Sail are set up right next door to major studios - you get your training, then you walk into the meat grinder.
That's sad. I feel like a lot of them would be better off getting a normal, well paying job as a non-gaming dev, then work on their own projects in their free time.
Glass was handed to him after the Explorer Edition was shut down. He had basically no involvement with anything Glass related that the public has had their hands on.
It's exactly the cloud part that costs money to run. That'd be like saying "this streaming services where you never receive a hard copy of your content should be free".
Ok, but you don't have to buy a Netflix CD and install it and then pay a monthly fee. You have to buy the Dropcam, and then on top of that you have to buy the service (or else your Dropcam is a brick). No thanks. At least Arlo has a free tier.
Actually, your Dropcam/Nestcam will be happy to give you a live feed for free. Also, you get a 3 month trial. In fact, I'd argue that buying a camera that provides "free" service forever is buying into a trap of some sort. There's simply no way to make money running a free service (it's the first law of thermoeconomics: money cannot be generated by providing a service that costs > $0 at a cost point of $0.)
The way to think about it is selling devices (money is made from bulk selling) vs. selling subscriptions (RMM.) If you are going to run a business with a cloud component, you need to either embed the cost of running that cloud in the price of the device or charge for the service. The Nest thermostat (pre-acquisition) fit the first model, Dropcam (pre-acquisition) fit the second. The camera was expensive because that's what it cost to make a camera with those specs. For comparison, a GoPro that ran basically on the same hardware - slightly different lenses, a sturdier case - was priced at around $400.
My guess is Arlo is burning investor money for projected growth, which is a perfectly valid trade-off (for a while.)
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you, it was an "expensive-razor-with-expensive-blades" situation, but over time we estimated the razor would get cheaper and the blades (for the same price) would cook your meals and wash the dishes.
For the record, I'm far from a millionaire entrepreneur. I'm just lucky enough to have worked at a great company that had a solid product and got sold for a good amount of money. Can't complain about the outcome, but you won't see me buying a mansion in LA any time soon ;)
It's only a monthly fee if you want recording. I have two dropcams, neither of which has a subscription attached, that I've been using for over two years now. I think I activated recording for one month of the entire period, when I wanted to see what was eating my garden, but the rest of the time, one acts as our "let's make sure the house didn't burn down on vacation" cam, and the other is a glorified baby cam, both of which we just check on-demand.
I recognize that I've bought a product that might stop working at Dropcam/Nest/Google's whim, but Google, at least, I trust to give reasonable notice for sunsetting.
I used the dropcam to replace a homebrewed IP cam setup + dyndns + yadda yadda + recording to my synology. It turns out that free wasn't very free -- it took too much of my time on an ongoing basis. Having the dropcam just work was worth the price (and the risk of it becoming a paperweight after three or four years -- which it hasn't yet!)
Why so indignant about paying for things? Hardware costs money, services costs money. There are humans working to make these things exist. Just like you (I bet).
Things aren't priced based on what they cost to make, they're priced based on what people will pay.
To me it feels like being nickel & dimed and honestly I'm sick of everything being a subscription (I've written on this elsewhere). At least with Spotify I still own my computer and headphones if I decide to cancel -- Drop/Nestcams are essentially $200 bricks if the internet goes down or you decide not to pay. My Nest thermostat still works without an internet connection.
Cell phones are a good example, you can either pay $0 up front and a larger subscription fee in a contract, or buy the phone up front and pay a smaller, no-contract subscription. Dropcams are the worst of both worlds.
(side note: I saw no mention of subscriptions on any of Nestcam's top level pages on their site.)
Obviously plenty of others think it's a fine deal, so I'm just the dissenting minority opinion :)
Exactly! You are the unhappy minority, and as much as I feel your pain, you are irrelevant business wise (sorry!)
I know that I'm personally very irrational when deciding prices: I find paying for HBO Now ($15 a month) an outrage, but will go and spend $20 on a cinema ticket without batting an eyelid. Heck, an Uber ride from the cinema because I'm too lazy is ~$10. Throw in a soda, and every trip to the cinema is about $40. I'm getting around 10 to 15 hours of entertainment out of the HBO subscription, which at ~$1 an hour is a much better deal than going to the movies, but no amount of rationalizing it will make it feel good.
There's clearly enough people that consider the $10 a month price "good enough" to be comfortable with it.
The fact that Alphabet/Google hasn't replaced him is a horribly disappointing statement about what they think is most important: profit, not employees, not culture.
Yeah, well, they're probably not doing so hot on the "profit" part, either since while they're all busy having their internal squabbles, they're not innovating AFAICT. No more Nest products for me, because they don't seem to do any better than less expensive options (now that competitors have caught up, which was not a monumental task). The thermostat and camera that I've got are pretty much standalone devices (the camera and thermostat might talk to each other now, I think). From my minimal research, those two devices do not appear that will be a part of a "home automation system" other than talking (poorly) to each other. No HomeKit integration, of course, now that Google has purchased them. Yeah, there's Brillo, but to (put it kindly) Google past performance doesn't have me holding my breath. I expect a poorly-documented, buggy first release and after a few years it'll be usable.
>No HomeKit integration, of course, now that Google has purchased them.
Probably completely unrelated since Nest doesn't even support Google's Brillo/Weave. They're going forward with their own "Nest Weave" which despite the name is a completely separate platform/ecosystem from Google's stuff.
Wouldn't be surprised if Homekit support is actually on the cards but it's stuck in their super slow release cycle.
They're going forward with their own "Nest Weave" which despite the name is a completely separate platform/ecosystem from Google's stuff
I swear, I don't know what gets into companies sometimes. They do that, they've all but assured that I'll never buy another Nest anything. Brillo? I wouldn't be happy about it (as primarily an Apple user), but I'd understand. And who knows, I'm open to options. But your own special snowflake API? Yeah, screw that, I've been down that road too many times.
On behalf of the team, thank you very much! There was a lot left to do to make Dropcam the product we all knew it could be in the future.
The thermostat was a nice product, and that's part of what's so interesting about the backstory of all of this.
I'm sorry you had to go through the pain as well. I will try to write more at some point, and I only hope it helps somehow, even if just for future entrepreneurs.
To be fair to Tony Fadell, as I understand it, he made the comments to his team and not the public, so he was probably speaking more from the hip than he would have if he was talking to a reporter.
In this case he was trying to assure his team that they shouldn't be worried about the departures, and one way to do so would be to try and spin it as a positive.
On the other hand, wow, you just said this about people who you are trying to integrate into your team.
Anyone whose managed people knows how hard it is to keep your employee's happy, especially when things aren't going well. You are constantly fighting battles and just when you feel like you've reached your breaking point you get another burden put on your shoulders.
TL/DR Stress is an awful thing and it makes people react in ways that they normally wouldn't.
Saying that internally is not any better. It is classless, shows a lack of EQ, a high degree of immaturity as a leader, and frankly, makes him look insecure.
If they really weren't any good, it should have been obvious to the rest of the team already.
Why not focus on the good qualities of the team members already there ?
This type of dialogue does not inspire trust in anyone. How can you trust someone who speaks ill of people behind their backs ? How do you know they won't do the same to you when your back is turned ?
Besides there is something profoundly wrong about taking stabs at someone who cannot defend themself. I am not sure I can fully get behind someone like that.
> To be fair to Tony Fadell, as I understand it, he made the comments to his team and not the public, so he was probably speaking more from the hip than he would have if he was talking to a reporter.
Character is doing the right thing when nobody's looking. There are too many people who think that the only thing that's right is to get by, and the only thing that's wrong is to get caught. - J. C. Watts
Character is what you are in the dark. - D.L. Moody
I'm starting to the think their needs to be a tech CEO version of these quotes. I think he needs to be fair to other people before someone is fair to him. Putting a positive spin on something by disparaging others is a sign of low character and poor leadership.
I have encountered this sort of sour grapes reaction to employee turnover a fair amount over the years. I have literally been told that no one who has ever left the company has been someone we needed or should have tried to retain.
Whenever a manager or executive tells the team that they didn't want the people who left anyway, it makes me think three things:
1. They shouldn't have continued to employ people who they didn't value in the first place -- if you have identified someone who isn't working out, it should be dealt with (fairly and humanely) rather than waiting for attrition to do your job for you.
2. This person probably says this about everyone who falls out of their favor.
3. For all I know this is what they'll be saying about me in a month, so I may as well make other plans and be somewhere that values employees appropriately.
It's really damaging to team morale to make these kinds of blanket statements, and I don't respect or trust people who refuse to hold themselves to a higher standard than that.
No, believe it or not he said it explicitly on the record to Reed when he was interviewed. That's one of the reasons I agreed to respond, and then I decided to follow up with this Medium post to make sure things were ultra clear.
What is happening with Google? Its strange that all their bets are resulting in these kind of childish situations. I understand unhappy employees leaking stuff but coming from the upper management like this is not good at all.
Who knows, but there's this vision of home automation that google has bought into and thinks it can sell. The logical place for your home automation 'master' is your thermostat. Everyone has one and having a nice one is well... nice and centralizing it as a sensor hub makes a lot of sense. Google saw Nest and knew it had a lot of potential, so they snapped it up. Now they're trying to sell us on this idea.
Personally, I'm just not seeing it. The idea of a centralized or master system is old fashioned. People will just buy automation as they need it. So I'll have an app on my phone for my Ring doorbell, another for my garage door, another for my security system, another for my lighting, etc. Google is betting that people won't want this and want an Apple-like experience of just having one vendor perform all their tasks, but people without SV salaries aren't going to casually drop Nest-like prices (total cost of the system with multiple smoke detectors is in the four digits) all at once and they might resent a high level of vendor lock-in. They'll just pick up random automation pieces at home depot for $99 each now and again and just install a new app as needed. Its not a terrible inconvenience and so what if my doorbell can't talk to my thermostat.
In this case, though, as I understand it (I live in NYC and am thus not the target market for these types of products besides maybe lightbulbs), Apple's solution, HomeKit, does allow interaction between disparate products, and it's even the banner feature!
But your 'central controller' is your phone's proprietary software. And a wireless central hub isn't always ideal because that central hub (your phone) sometimes leaves the house.
The one-off methodology is a poor one. It's popular recently because of how cheap and easy it is to retail such a product. But it's very limiting in what you can do, and those devices are likely to be prone to security issues.
Central management is key. Though I suspect most people would be better off using a central device many of them already have at home (a PC) than buying a custom piece of hardware to be the center of their home network.
Basing everything around your phone isn't a good solution, because it leads to having a half dozen accounts with a half dozen apps that you need to set up on a half dozen devices if you have a family...
But this is all a debate independent of Google's troubles. Between Android@Home and OnHub and Nest, Google's been trying to nail down IoT since before IoT was an expression people used. No sign they're going to get the hang of it any time soon.
> so what if my doorbell can't talk to my thermostat.
Your doorbell and thermostat have little to do with each other, but having your camera or your smoke detector as mention sensors for your thermostat is pretty useful. The smoke detectors especially, since they tend to be in the bedrooms, which is the place where you'll stay 8 hours a day without walking in front of your thermostat so that it knows you are home.
Larry thinks the way to win as a large company is to act like a small one. A big component of this is putting megalomaniacs in charge of teams/divisions and giving them near-total autonomy.
It doesn't work, but he's obsessed with velocity, so he keeps doing it.
It is not obvious that "Reed Albergotti’s recent article." is a link. No anchor tag styling css to know otherwise. On clicking the hidden link I see the following
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It will nice, if we can fix both problems, so your medium article reaches more target audience.
The link is underlined. But what you need to understand is that Medium is way too cool to underline text they way a normal website would [0], and instead does it using a gradient as a background image. Maybe you're blocking background images, or something like that?
What? Yes, it is underlined in Safari but not in Chrome. I am checking what is different in Chrome. I don't have any fancy plugins/extensions in Chrome which blocks images other than adblock.
54 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 86.8 ms ] threadI also worked at Nest (on the thermostat product) and couldn't echo your comments more strongly.
Tony Fadell is a terrible manager. There are so many public data points at this point: the perma 6 day work weeks, the "f* being Googly" comment at the all hands, refusing to allow Nest employees to have the Google massage benefits because "they don't deserve it", and now, throwing a great team under the bus to hide his inability to manage. I have another twenty that I can't share because of confidentiality and I'm sure you do as well.
The fact that Alphabet/Google hasn't replaced him is a horribly disappointing statement about what they think is most important: profit, not employees, not culture. Or maybe not even profit after your comments. :(
Please do write the other story about your acquisition when you can - a lot of people here could learn a lot from it as a cautionary tale.
I can't fathom having to do that at a salaried job and staying for more than two weeks. Unless they were paying me an obscene amount of money, but even then, I'd probably be on the look out for something better.
I'd rather have a well paying dev job with reasonable hours, and work on games in my own time.
Also, the pipeline and recruiting is set up for it. Places like Full Sail are set up right next door to major studios - you get your training, then you walk into the meat grinder.
But yeah, gamasutra does a survey each year and the career time in gamedev is usually around ~3 years.
Wikipedia has him as leading Google Glass. I guess that is all you need to know about his qualities then.
Besides, Arlo's freemium so I don't really get your argument (you get 7 days of recording free, up to 5 cameras; $$ if you want more of either).
I like the idea of Dropcam, but $200/camera PLUS a monthly fee I can't swallow. It's an expensive razor with expensive blades.
But, I'm just some random schmo and not a millionaire who sold his company to Google, so feel free to disagree!
My guess is Arlo is burning investor money for projected growth, which is a perfectly valid trade-off (for a while.)
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you, it was an "expensive-razor-with-expensive-blades" situation, but over time we estimated the razor would get cheaper and the blades (for the same price) would cook your meals and wash the dishes.
For the record, I'm far from a millionaire entrepreneur. I'm just lucky enough to have worked at a great company that had a solid product and got sold for a good amount of money. Can't complain about the outcome, but you won't see me buying a mansion in LA any time soon ;)
I recognize that I've bought a product that might stop working at Dropcam/Nest/Google's whim, but Google, at least, I trust to give reasonable notice for sunsetting.
I used the dropcam to replace a homebrewed IP cam setup + dyndns + yadda yadda + recording to my synology. It turns out that free wasn't very free -- it took too much of my time on an ongoing basis. Having the dropcam just work was worth the price (and the risk of it becoming a paperweight after three or four years -- which it hasn't yet!)
To me it feels like being nickel & dimed and honestly I'm sick of everything being a subscription (I've written on this elsewhere). At least with Spotify I still own my computer and headphones if I decide to cancel -- Drop/Nestcams are essentially $200 bricks if the internet goes down or you decide not to pay. My Nest thermostat still works without an internet connection.
Cell phones are a good example, you can either pay $0 up front and a larger subscription fee in a contract, or buy the phone up front and pay a smaller, no-contract subscription. Dropcams are the worst of both worlds.
(side note: I saw no mention of subscriptions on any of Nestcam's top level pages on their site.)
Obviously plenty of others think it's a fine deal, so I'm just the dissenting minority opinion :)
I know that I'm personally very irrational when deciding prices: I find paying for HBO Now ($15 a month) an outrage, but will go and spend $20 on a cinema ticket without batting an eyelid. Heck, an Uber ride from the cinema because I'm too lazy is ~$10. Throw in a soda, and every trip to the cinema is about $40. I'm getting around 10 to 15 hours of entertainment out of the HBO subscription, which at ~$1 an hour is a much better deal than going to the movies, but no amount of rationalizing it will make it feel good.
There's clearly enough people that consider the $10 a month price "good enough" to be comfortable with it.
Yeah, well, they're probably not doing so hot on the "profit" part, either since while they're all busy having their internal squabbles, they're not innovating AFAICT. No more Nest products for me, because they don't seem to do any better than less expensive options (now that competitors have caught up, which was not a monumental task). The thermostat and camera that I've got are pretty much standalone devices (the camera and thermostat might talk to each other now, I think). From my minimal research, those two devices do not appear that will be a part of a "home automation system" other than talking (poorly) to each other. No HomeKit integration, of course, now that Google has purchased them. Yeah, there's Brillo, but to (put it kindly) Google past performance doesn't have me holding my breath. I expect a poorly-documented, buggy first release and after a few years it'll be usable.
Probably completely unrelated since Nest doesn't even support Google's Brillo/Weave. They're going forward with their own "Nest Weave" which despite the name is a completely separate platform/ecosystem from Google's stuff.
Wouldn't be surprised if Homekit support is actually on the cards but it's stuck in their super slow release cycle.
I swear, I don't know what gets into companies sometimes. They do that, they've all but assured that I'll never buy another Nest anything. Brillo? I wouldn't be happy about it (as primarily an Apple user), but I'd understand. And who knows, I'm open to options. But your own special snowflake API? Yeah, screw that, I've been down that road too many times.
The thermostat was a nice product, and that's part of what's so interesting about the backstory of all of this.
I'm sorry you had to go through the pain as well. I will try to write more at some point, and I only hope it helps somehow, even if just for future entrepreneurs.
To be fair to Tony Fadell, as I understand it, he made the comments to his team and not the public, so he was probably speaking more from the hip than he would have if he was talking to a reporter.
In this case he was trying to assure his team that they shouldn't be worried about the departures, and one way to do so would be to try and spin it as a positive. On the other hand, wow, you just said this about people who you are trying to integrate into your team.
Anyone whose managed people knows how hard it is to keep your employee's happy, especially when things aren't going well. You are constantly fighting battles and just when you feel like you've reached your breaking point you get another burden put on your shoulders.
TL/DR Stress is an awful thing and it makes people react in ways that they normally wouldn't.
If they really weren't any good, it should have been obvious to the rest of the team already.
This type of dialogue does not inspire trust in anyone. How can you trust someone who speaks ill of people behind their backs ? How do you know they won't do the same to you when your back is turned ?
Besides there is something profoundly wrong about taking stabs at someone who cannot defend themself. I am not sure I can fully get behind someone like that.
Character is doing the right thing when nobody's looking. There are too many people who think that the only thing that's right is to get by, and the only thing that's wrong is to get caught. - J. C. Watts
Character is what you are in the dark. - D.L. Moody
I'm starting to the think their needs to be a tech CEO version of these quotes. I think he needs to be fair to other people before someone is fair to him. Putting a positive spin on something by disparaging others is a sign of low character and poor leadership.
Whenever a manager or executive tells the team that they didn't want the people who left anyway, it makes me think three things:
1. They shouldn't have continued to employ people who they didn't value in the first place -- if you have identified someone who isn't working out, it should be dealt with (fairly and humanely) rather than waiting for attrition to do your job for you.
2. This person probably says this about everyone who falls out of their favor.
3. For all I know this is what they'll be saying about me in a month, so I may as well make other plans and be somewhere that values employees appropriately.
It's really damaging to team morale to make these kinds of blanket statements, and I don't respect or trust people who refuse to hold themselves to a higher standard than that.
Personally, I'm just not seeing it. The idea of a centralized or master system is old fashioned. People will just buy automation as they need it. So I'll have an app on my phone for my Ring doorbell, another for my garage door, another for my security system, another for my lighting, etc. Google is betting that people won't want this and want an Apple-like experience of just having one vendor perform all their tasks, but people without SV salaries aren't going to casually drop Nest-like prices (total cost of the system with multiple smoke detectors is in the four digits) all at once and they might resent a high level of vendor lock-in. They'll just pick up random automation pieces at home depot for $99 each now and again and just install a new app as needed. Its not a terrible inconvenience and so what if my doorbell can't talk to my thermostat.
https://www.apple.com/ios/homekit/
Central management is key. Though I suspect most people would be better off using a central device many of them already have at home (a PC) than buying a custom piece of hardware to be the center of their home network.
Basing everything around your phone isn't a good solution, because it leads to having a half dozen accounts with a half dozen apps that you need to set up on a half dozen devices if you have a family...
But this is all a debate independent of Google's troubles. Between Android@Home and OnHub and Nest, Google's been trying to nail down IoT since before IoT was an expression people used. No sign they're going to get the hang of it any time soon.
I mostly agree with your overall point though. I'm just not sure what an automated home would really do that I should care about.
Your doorbell and thermostat have little to do with each other, but having your camera or your smoke detector as mention sensors for your thermostat is pretty useful. The smoke detectors especially, since they tend to be in the bedrooms, which is the place where you'll stay 8 hours a day without walking in front of your thermostat so that it knows you are home.
It doesn't work, but he's obsessed with velocity, so he keeps doing it.
It is not obvious that "Reed Albergotti’s recent article." is a link. No anchor tag styling css to know otherwise. On clicking the hidden link I see the following
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It will nice, if we can fix both problems, so your medium article reaches more target audience.
[0] https://medium.com/designing-medium/crafting-link-underlines...