> This is enshittification: Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit
The reality is that 90% of Google product dysfunction can be explained by the phrase: "shipping the org chart" not by any particular $$-related malice.
Inter-product-area rivalries/competitions/dysfunctions. Product manager attention span problems. High ego, high-status engineers with nice new technological hammers (e.g. Flutter, Fuchsia, Dart) that absolutely need to find nails, so go take other people's projects to rewrite.
Working in Home / Nest PA was very trying on the patience. They were bad for it, but the problem is endemic to anything user-facing at Google (see also Play Music vs YouTube Music, ChromeOS vs Android, Android Things, etc. etc.)
Yep. People used to make fun of Microsoft for their org chart where devdiv was holding a gun to everyone threatening to set fire to the building if Win32 was ever touched, but at least it was between massive orgs within a single massive org.
Google has a bunch of managers all vying to get their own promotions and will not hesitate to fuck over both users and other teams just for their moment of glory at Google I/O. And all of this stems from the fact that there's no leadership at Google, with an absolute inability to rally troops together on a single, common goal.
The problem at its root is despite this stuff being the major external public appearance of Google, it is in fact all just a side show to the real Google -- which is all data centre hosted core services stuff doing ads, search, etc.
Behind all that stuff is an incredibly competent smart SRE team keeping the lights on and keeping things very efficient and reliable. And some boring but diligent SWEs writing the rather boring code to do all that boring stuff. That's what the real Google is, but it's invisible to the public.
But all that ads money needs to be spent somewhere. And you can't grow your staff forever doing "boring" stuff. And if there's an exciting interesting project inside Google it's flies to shit, people stepping over each other for promotion.
It's indirectly noticeable by YouTube not having gone out of business despite a free model with high costs. Note also how its biggest competitor, Twitch, is owned by another data center giant : Amazon (AWS).
The only way YouTube and Twitch can stay in business is because their respective owners have the scale to demand massive, massive peering discounts from "last-mile" ISPs and, at least in the case of Google, can avoid middle men on the intercontinental fiber links as they simply have their own cables where they don't need to pay rents to anyone.
YouTube has a lot of ads nowadays. Of course it can do that because it's in a quasi-monopolistic position, which is a direct result of Google cross-financing it from search ads revenue. (Similarly how Chrome got into its own position.)
AFAIK they fixed the infighting more than a decade ago. That's why you don't see it causing problems. But also AFAIK (because I was never there), forced competition got all the way into single developers.
Conway's law: ..complex products end up "shaped like" the organizational structure they are designed in or designed for. The law is applied primarily in the field of software architecture, though Conway directed it more broadly and its assumptions and conclusions apply to most technical fields.
Friends who worked for google seemed to be rewarded for new groundbreaking stuff, but were penalized for maintenance or saving money or anything having to do with the present.
but "shipping the org chart" really explains a lot of tech good and bad.
When sj was at apple, product was well-integrated software and hardware (as he ruled the org chart, which left no space for rivalries and fiefdoms)
with every sh*tty iot device that phones home, marketing in the org chart makes for a monetized, not-private mess for customers.
It seemed like Jobs at Apple and Gates at Microsoft avoided a huge amount of organizational bullshit via a technical fleet-in-being doctrine. [0]
Even if their time and attention were finite, they inspired a credible worry throughout the company that they might suprisingly appear and demand answers on why a team is @$&@ing up tech / UX, as PMs/VPs rightly asked themselves "Do I want to be explaining my behavior to X?"
Which seemed to tamp down on the amount of inter-fiefdom rivalries and wasted time.
I don't get the impression many people are worried about Pichai breathing tech/ UX fire from on high in the same way.
I think it's that what Microsoft had in the 90s and what Apple had in the 2010s (and to some degree now) was an existential clear mission. Forking off into idiocy was obviously discouraged by leadership but also the profit and survival and success motive was clear: ship improved iPhones and make revenue on them, improve and ship Office or Windows, etc. That's the source of revenue, that's the clear mission.
Google's consumer products lack that. Google has an ad machine that just produces seemingly infinite cash. The hardware and consumer facing stuff is a sideshow. So it escapes project discipline.
That's not the problem at Google -- Google's issue isn't tech/UX competence at all (when they want to, they're stellar at it).
To the contrary, Google culture (including, presumably, Pichai's views) is explicitly to try lots of competing ideas within Google and to disrupt from within. What other company would have Gmail and (previously) Inbox, multiple music services, a gazillion messaging apps, and so on?
This isn't a failure of management or accountability, this is consciously chosen policy at the highest levels. Resources go towards self-disruption by launching more new things in the same category, rather than choosing to focus on one and committing to it. This is why people are promoted for launches rather than for maintenance and support.
The upside is that Google launches way more products and could dramatically up its odds of success in a category. The downside is products fail because they don't get the support to see them through, consumers are totally confused by redundant products, and Google gets a reputation for cancelling products which might actually hinder future adoption (at least in some tech circles).
Obviously Google still seems to think the upside outweighs the downside... while many on HN come to the opposite conclusion. :)
They're just rolling the dice over and over again trying to repeat the blow-out self-sustaining revenue success they had with AdWords. And it will never happen.
Historically that's was Google's approach, but now it seems like a weird Frankenstein mash of that+strategy.
E.g. the topical buying Nest, but then force folding it into Google Home
That's the opposite of letting the best solution among competing options win.
The broader issue is that it doesn't seem like there's a CEO who shows up in the Google Home's team meeting and live demos the broken and missing features, shows them on Nest, and then demands answers for why this wasn't done before they forced migration.
As has been quipped on here, Pichai seems to act more like a Google advocate who avoids rocking the internal boat, versus the rabid user advocate that Gates / Jobs / Bezos reportedly were.
And when there's no one you're afraid of at the top... of course the organization devolves into petty fiefdoms and bickering, at the expense of users.
Yeah, the other downside I should have mentioned is they have no good strategy for what to do when they're left with multiple products after years.
They eventually choose to sunset one, and simplify brands, but in a really haphazard, broken-features way, just like we're seeing here.
But again, the issue isn't that the CEO's not checking up on the details. It's not one of quality control. It's that they don't care. It's not process, it's goals. I can't imagine Sundar wasn't briefed that the migration will involve missing features, and he signed off on that.
Because Google's core values are about trying lots of new things, with a focus on scalability and search and machine learning and metrics. Google's core values are very specifically not about maintaining consistent quality, committing to products, or guaranteeing features -- or being a "user advocate" as you mention.
So this is all just to reiterate. These aren't process failures. These are Google's processes working as intended. The Nest failures here are simply a reflection of Google's actual goals.
From the outside, Microsoft seems to have a complete undivided focus on the customer. It may be on helping, or it may be of fucking the customer, but it's on the customer.
That makes it impossible to ship their organogram.
Apple seems to have escaped it mostly by centralizing power, but I don't think they are currently keeping it.
And what is obviously missing from this scenario is anyone in the Google organization that has the slightest care or concern for any customer need. Also strongly correlates with their obvious zero customer support / you-re-on-your-own practices. The entire company is just "what can we foist off on them this week?".
I will invest money in equipment operated by Google. While in general it's not great to rely on a backend service, additionally so when it comes to privacy and Google, on top of that Google has this habit of killing products without consideration for their customer base that I find unsettling.
They have a Matter-enabled thermostat. If that can integrate into Home Assistant without an internet connection (which should be the case), you are absolutely not “the product” for buying one. You’re just buying the best locally-controlled thermostat you can.
Well, Fuchsia team that drives the OS on Nest devices were hit heavily by the layoffs[0], so I guess those lazy coasters won't be able to fix your problems anymore.
Might be a net improvement, as the quality of the devices was headed downward even when the organization was fully staffed. I'd be content for the devices to be left alone in stasis instead of having someone tinker with something and break it, just as they made reliable Bluetooth connectivity that I used to take for granted into a daily exercise in frustration.
I remember years ago when Google I/O and Apple’s equivalent felt like the Super Bowl. Now I don’t even know when they are or really care. I miss those days.
2) Security architectural changes that patch theoretical issues of the 7th dimension, and mess up all existing apps unless the developer rewrites 80% of the codebase
3) Pixel n+1 with more mega-everything (megapixels, megabytes of memory, megahertz per cpu, etc)
I’m surprised Munroe hasn’t made a meta xkcd about this phenomenon. I expect the top linked ones are: this, the single package holding up the internet, when to automate, git commands, and ???
My Nest camera is pretty hilariously bad as well. It literally just watches my mailbox and the path to it, and 90% of the time, my mailman is able to sneak past it without setting off the motion detection. They're literally in frame and just walking for 10-20s but that's not enough to register as motion even on the highest sensitivity.
The Ring with a similar vantage point detects it every time.
I've heard similar stories from others. My Nest doorbell has issues, too, unless someone is right on the porch. I'm ready to get cameras but waiting for the next Prime Day when I can probably pick up two Rings for the price of one Nest cam (and maybe even a previous gen doorbell?). The multi-app thing, as most others have noted, is also infuriating and pathetic at this point. Not OK, Google.
Google has spent nearly the last decade completely ruining any goodwill Nest had established through a comedy of errors and sheer, wanton incompetence.
It's absolutely breathtaking how bad Google is at shipping functioning software. I don't know how Rick Osterloh or Rishi Chandra still have jobs, but they should answer for the following litany of catastrophic product decisions:
* Google decides to abandon Nest as a separate, highly-prized brand and product line, and instead bring everything under the Google Home umbrella. This process is excruciating and a monumental, half-decade-long failure. It is the very definition of a legacy rewrite pattern gone awry, but coupled with billions of dollars of purchased, installed hardware in people's actual homes.
* This starts with the "force Nest users to have a Google account to use Nest" and "Googlekill Works With Nest" decisions. Google decides to gate certain features and to encourage people to upgrade to the Google Home implementation of the Nest functionality, but completely left feature parity a decade behind.
To wit, Google Home's app, beyond being buggy, also can't do basic things like allow for easy scrubbing of video feeds, or control of the Nest Protect smoke detectors.
* Google also willfully murders Works With Nest, and kills with it the goodwill of hundreds of manufacturers who were pretty excited to build compatible products and services. This is migrated to a Works with Google/Assistant product that... again, completely lacks parity. They break the Home/Away functionality entirely. They delay this process a bit, and Works with Google catches up in some ways, but it takes literal years.
* Google releases a new line of Nest Cams that... don't work with the Nest app. Indeed, you have to activate them in the Google Home app, and their feeds will not display in the Nest app. From a Product Manager perspective, this is very easy to back into: Google is on a slow, death-march termination of the Nest app, in favor of migrating to Google Home. Rather than building any new functionality into the Nest app (these new cams included battery and floodlight functions, for example), they decided it made more sense to force users to use the Google Home app.
Except... the Google Home app STILL lacks parity with the now-8-year-old Nest app. The Google Home app, as of May the 8th in the year of our lord 2023, does not support the fantastic SightView video scrubbing functionality. Or, as it happens, ANY scrubbing functionality. It doesn't support the ability to generate and download video clips. And the web version, which has been in a public preview for over a year, STILL doesn't support the ability to even view the pre-tagged movement sessions that you can view in the mobile app.
But to say this again: new Nest Cam users cannot view 100% of the video recorded by the Nest Cams. It is functionally impossible and completely ridiculous, considering the Dropcam/earlier Nest Cams have been able to do this for literally a decade.
* Beyond that sheer lunacy, Rick Osterloh gets up on stage and has the temerity to announce with a big dumb grin on his face the Nest Doorbell: the "upgrade" (in literally no metric) from the older Nest Hello. This product has two variants: a wired and battery powered version, for people who don't have doorbell wiring. The wired product manages to ship into end users' hands with a curious limitation: even when wired, the product is INCAPABLE of recording 24-hour footage. Note that the Nest Hello, launched in 2017, supported this functionality out of the box and still does. When pressed for a reason, Rick says that the thermals were a limitation, coupled with how thin they wanted to make the product.
I'll say this again slowly: for some reason, a Product Manager at Google thought that the THINNESS of a PERMANENTLY INSTALLED, FIXED LOCATION VIDEO DOORBELL was more important than its ability to actually record video reliably. How on earth do...
This makes me embarrassed to be a Nest ecosystem user. Zero chance I'll pick up the ADT box - maybe I will spend some time seeing if the nest secure hub is hardware hackable as I happen to have 3 of them (it was the cheapest way to buy the sensors when they discontinued selling them).
See my comment elsewhere. Shipping the org chart. It's not about serving the customer, it's about perf, or your own ego.
I played a minor bit role in shipping the original Nest Home Hubs. They sold like hotcakes. Huge success. Was kind of proud of them despite all their technical warts internally. Within a few months of launch they were already rewriting the whole UI and OS stack (Fuchsia, Flutter). Which was predictably literally years late by the time it shipped, and now of course they're killing the whole line. And the whole time we were working on the original product it was in brutal internal competition with a similar product built on Android but which was a total commercial failure and relegated to disinterested third parties (and just got finally taken off life support)
It really is like nobody there had ever read any foundational software engineering planning texts. The arrogance and incompetence is outstanding, especially when you notice how incredibly smart all the people working on it are, but behave collectively stupid.
So there are other things going on here and I did end up moving from Nest to Ecobee and mostly am okay with the switch. (The bar is very, very low right now.)
But I wanted to clarify about video recording and viewing 100% of clips:
there are two service levels from Google: either you’re grandfathered on older pricing plans per camera and can see a 24/7 recording or you upgrade to new plans per household that they sell now where the camera only records and sends motion or sounds, not 24/7 feed recordings like the old Dropcam used to.
You can’t buy the old way of recording 24/7 from every camera as far as I know, and the only reason I can think of that they switched recording modes is because it saves power and is more efficient so hardware might not break as often via overheating. I mean, they might claim it is more efficient for storage, but they have stationary cameras - compression has to be good, right?
Anyway, just pointing out that generating clips from video recordings is kind of the old way, and the new way is that it somehow automatically makes clips for you as motion alerts.
But… outside of that I agree 100% that Nest has been basically dead since the rebranding. That Ecobee still has any unique features Google doesn’t have largely stems from this lack of innovation.
Ecobee is now owned by a company that makes generators, the kind that runs on gas or diesel. It’s hard to imagine that Google can’t ship new features, apps or software products faster than a company that makes industrial appliances and yet here we are.
Google makes too much money from ads to care about any other way to make money, long term. I’m shocked they don’t just give away these smart devices and wire them up to play YouTube ads with facial recognition at this point.
Maybe they’re waiting for Amazon to try it first, or want to experiment with Google TV ads like Fire TV and Samsung already do. If my Apple TV ever starts auto-playing trailers and ads, I’m going to permanently switch to using AirPlay, I think.
As for the Dropcam, maybe I’ll replace it with an iCloud video camera when the time comes…
To add to this: the Nest Protect isn’t compliant with Australian, NZ, or some EU countries standards due to it using single-insulated wires and not being compatible with hard-wired interconnects. This has been a problem for 6 years and most licensed electricians refuse to install them, but they just keep selling it? (I’m not actually sure if it’s even legal to sell it technically?)
Without knowing, I'd expect Bosch and all the others to have a similar product, just five years late, slightly more expensive due to more realistic accounting, extremely boring, and without any of the shortcomings that GP has listed. Those are the ones that will last for decades. Their apps will never be amazing, but they'll last.
I wouldn't count on it. Bosch and other manufacturers are doing similar shenanigans.
For instance I have a Siemens cloth drying machine, 7 years old, barely used. It's broken, clothes are wet and not warm when it finishes. I cleaned it completely. A service technician was there but couldn't repair it.
I believe it's a programmed defect that happens after a certain amount of time.
I can't prove it, but how come it's broken with nothing on the physical side being defect? Must be a software issue.
I thankfully haven't bought any Nest things, but your mention of Google Home turns out to have triggered me slightly!
Many years ago, I bought a bunch of Chromecast Audio devices - these are/were little wifi dongles with a 3.5mm jack and USB power. I could set them up as a group and they'd sync perfectly with each other. I had a pretty cheap multi-room sound system.
Then at some point, the Google app I was using for them stopped working and it transpired the functionality had been moved to "Google Home". Over the following few months I spent hours turning the things off and on again, resetting them, re-creating groups, but it never worked for more than a few hours. I gave up, went back to bluetooth.
Just wanted to say thank you for this fantastic comment, I'd really suggest you turn it into a blog post with links/images and submit to HN on its own. There's so much important material here that I've never seen put together in one place before.
Thanks for this. It's absolutely infuriated me and I had basically written that post as a blog/article in my head but figured here was a pretty high visibility spot to share my rant.
Also surprises me no one hits Google for their environmental hypocrisy when we're talking about purely induced e-waste here. The fact that the Nest Detects and Nest Guards are being made useless is so galling to me. Replacing them with an objectively worse option is the Google piss on the shit sundae.
It's actually incredible how bad the Google Home app and the whole account debacle is.
Had the old Nest thermostat and a few cameras for ~7 years. All worked pretty well with the Nest app.
I moved and bought the cheaper Nest thermostat E ~18 months ago, and it is without a doubt, the worst thermostat I have ever seen. First, it won't even run without being connected to the Google Home app. Then, app setup would fail repeatedly with a generic "Failed to setup" message. I had to get on Reddit to discover it doesn't work with G Workspace accounts.
And after all of that, the touch controls are next to impossible to use. And they somehow managed to make setting the temperature incredibly confusing. Like using an app should make that easier, but it is far, far harder than the on-device config screen on the Honeywell thermostat from 2004. It's.... I don't understand.
THEN, last week, something happened and I can no longer access any of the old Nest stuff in Google Home. It was in a separate Google account, and everything just disappeared. And Google wants me to verify access to that account using some bizarre onetime code setting buried in my phone, which repeatedly fails. So I can't use any of that stuff either.
I hate ranting on the internet, but wow this has gotten out of hand.
Love this comment and the passion behind it. Another non-US person here who routinely has to do a buttload of research to know whether products will be supported (or usable) in the future, especially with US-centric takeovers.
I wish these companies had some sort of open source pact built into the licensing, eg after 3 years the support window ends but the software becomes open source. We won't solve your problems anymore but you/the community can if you want.
People I know well recently decided to buy some Nest products, so I was very interested to read this article. But I was disappointed to find that the article has basically zero content? It just seems to... end without actually saying anything beyond "Google bad".
In what specific ways has Google failed its customers with Nest products? Is it just the app (the only thing mentioned in the article)?
Nest still sends me a monthly summary email for account that’s maybe nine years stale, despite my repeated attempts to get them to stop. Their customer support says there’s “nothing they can do”.
The Nest smoke alarms at a friend’s house say (as in play over the speakers a voice saying) “Remote access attempt detected” every so often while we’re sitting in the living room. At least twice a year they go off in the middle of the night (without smoke).
So I guess when you’re contacting customers who don’t want it, and your alarms wrongly sound, I would say you have a problem with your false positive rate
You must not have any smoke alarms at all, then. Every smoke alarm in every place I’ve ever lived has had false alarms. I hate smoke detectors so much. The manufacturers are too scared of liability to consider that smoke alarms only work if they’re plugged in and the alarms can be trusted. If you unplug the smoke alarms due to false alarms, then all the liability is on you, not the manufacturer.
I’d happily pay a premium for smoke alarms less prone to false alarms, but none such exist as far as I can tell.
When I bought my house we had one false alarm at night. Since the smoke detectors were past their prime (you are suppose to replace every 10 years) we replaced them all and haven’t had any problem since (>3 years). Just went off a few times when things got smokey in the kitchen.
Poster said they go off in the middle of the night, twice a year, with no smoke. I have lived in dwellings with smoke alarms for over forty years and this has never happened. My current house has seven smoke alarms and we’ve been here seven years and this has never happened.
For what it's worth, I have never had a false smoke alarm. Neither have I heard of such, I didn't even know that's a thing. Unless you count cooking gone awry.
Google seems to be appallingly bad at any non ad supported product. They've managed to screw up all their ISP products (Google Public WiFi, Fiber, Loon, etc.)
Now the home automation products.
The company has no culture of customer service, which dooms any product which requires it.
I just hope they don't screw up self driving cars, where they're actually succeeding.
This (Nest, and other home devices) can't be profitable if it requires much customer service anyway... It just needs to work after install with no issues (or changes/regressions) for 10-20 years.
I contacted ecobee to get clarification on one of their wire diagrams and they were able to provide customer support. I buy zooz smart devices which are much cheaper than a nest and they have given me detailed wiring instructions based on photos I sent them. It is possible to be profitable and provide customer support. Most customers aren't contacting support every time they buy a product. Building a good reputation helps sell more product.
Well, they kept the phone line alive ever since the forst Nexuses. And I am glad they didn't kill when they switched to the Pixel brand. But then those devices support search and ads...
Installing a Nest learning thermostat in the summer was ... illuminating.
Turns out they only learn for the first few weeks. After three calls with tech support, we reset it enough times that it learned how to turn on the heat by 11am on weekdays.
Perhaps someday someone will have the patience to try and get auto-learning working on the weekends too.
I’ve used three nests for about 10 years. Their “learning” is ridiculous and has never been helpful. Every once in a while, they will completely rewrite my schedule to something stupid. It’s weird how wrong they are- setting to temps I’ve never set, setting at times I never want.
I gave up and just have Alexa do time based automations to set temperatures. At least until google kills the nest api.
I always found it funny how google’s “AI” is so stupid when it comes to user satisfaction instead of making them money.
I want google to be good, but I'm still pissed off about all the things they've killed in the past, specifically PICASA, Google Drive Sync and their RSS Reader.
I'll never trust them again with locking myself into their ecosystem. The worry is when you buy into something like Nest, who later go on to be brought into Google.
> The worry is when you buy into something like Nest, who later go on to be brought into Google.
Obviously one cannot prevent things like that from happening, but when they do, you can decide to migrate to something else and just sell your existing (now Google) gear, to avoid Googley issues down the line.
It may be cynical, but at that point the resale value might still be good because not everyone has caught on to Google being Google like this.
No, you can prevent it from being a problem by only buying things that will work even if the company goes bankrupt or gets acquired or turns [more] evil. I owned a Fitbit, then they got bought by Google. Now I own a PineTime, and you know what? If somehow tomorrow Pine64 got bought out and killed by Google, my watch would not be worsened one bit.
Amen. I'm still using Picasa: periodically I go prowling for an equivalent app but there's still nothing to touch it. Fuck their photo cloud: I have ADSL so uploads are sluggards. I need local storage, fast searching, good facial recognition, a lightweight UI, and that's Picasa.
Of course the web-connected parts like positioning on a map or sharing online broke long ago, but they appear to have neglected to build in a kill switch so mere user me can keep on getting shit done, invulnerable to their idiocy-of-the-day
My dad used to be a very heavy Picasa user, I eventually transitioned him to "DigiKam" which seems to be working out - so maybe worth checking that if you haven't. (If it's simple enough for a man who's steadfastly refused to learn anything new for 40 years it might be easy to switch.)
I've got a precious Lightroom 6 license so I've been sticking with that.
Thanks - it's probably time to try DigiKam again since I can see quite recent discussions of improved face recognition (and I like that it's open source; pity Google didn't open Picasa but that's quite in keeping with the overall topic here of them stumblebumming user care)
In my household, we have decided to never purchase another Google device again. No Home Hub, No Cameras, No Pixel phones, No TV's running Android. I still have some legacy stuff that works, but will not give google another dollar. They have shown time and time and time again that they simply don't care.
For the record I used to be a huge Google fan. Had many of the Pixel phones, had Nest cameras, doorbells, nest secure, nest protects, multiple TV's running Android TV, Stadia (lol), and more.
Roku is the best in my experience. I have Samsung, Google (Sony), and Roku devices between my primary home and a rental. The Roku devices are reliable, responsive, and continue to receive updates. In comparison the Samsung UI is laggy though usable.
Google TV is unusable for 10-30s of refresh depending on how long it has been since you’ve used the TV. It’s the worst part of an otherwise high end TV. The multiple user UX is odd across Google products. You can haplessly sign in to your account for YouTube TV on another family member’s Google (TV) account without it bringing up an account switcher. About five minutes into you wondering why your settings are off (or being annoyed because you realized what happened) you get Google’s suggestion to press the right combination of buttons on the remote to do so. Then you switch accounts and sit through the 30s of account refresh. It’s death by a thousand cuts.
Roku is great. It does what you ask. Settings are remembered. The Roku Ultra 4K upscaler produces a great image. I used it to replace the Samsung experience on one of their first Gen OLED TVs that still produces a great image in spite of its slowly failing software stack.
Samsung seems to simply give up on updating the software on the TV at some point. Things start failing over time as services move on past your TV’s software stack. My newer Frame TV is on the newest software stack (for now) and everything works fine in comparison. Probably my biggest annoyance is the laggy UI and that they try really hard to direct you to their free TV channel. You were watching YouTube the last time you watched the TV, but nevermind that. Samsung wants to show you a loud TV show from the 50s on their classic TV channel. Or KPop. Or Hells Kitchen. Not sure why but that is what my Samsung TVs cycle through.
Seems like a good place to ask... do people run explicit firewalls for their Roku devices?
Realize it's cat and mouse with an updatable controlled platform's data exfiltration, but curious if there are any low-maintenance solutions to do some good?
Agree that Rokus are a great solution, but I'm uncomfortable with a one-time-purchase device's long-term revenue priorities.
I have a few Roku devices around. All my IoT devices are relegated to a segmented VLAN. Beyond that DNS is locked down. I block all of the DoH/DoT providers that are commonly used and then run specific DNS block lists for manufacturers. I also leverage NextDNS [0] as it easily allows me to build profiles per use case. I know they also have Roku specific DNS blocking (for telemetry, ads, etc). I had used PiHole in the past but like that I can use NextDNS everywhere all the time much more easily than I can with PiHole. It also provides overrides so I can still resolve internal addresses where I might want to. This helps when using things like Tailscale and not having to rely on another subdomain to think about.
One of my TVs has a Roku; I have them plugged into a powerstrip with control/switched outlets, so that power to the Roku gets cut when the TV is turned off.
Apple TV or your own Kodi box is probably the best in that category. I used to use Apple TV and leave the Smart TV itself off the internet. The family wanted tighter google integration so that eventually went away.
Also remember that if you’re using cloud TV services, you’re just moving the data aggregation/ad network integrations/resale to that service.
Despite having no other Apple devices in our household, we've been using and loving AppleTV for years. It really "just works", and keeps getting updates etc.
I believe LG has really good software and their OLED's are amazing. That will be my next purchase when the current TV gets too outdated.
I currently have a Sony one with Android TV that I bought in 2017 and software wise it's unusable. I have Apple TV setup for all the media apps and that works well enough though.
I did. Outright killing the Nest Secure without warning nor compensation was my final straw. Say what you will about Apple, at least they support their products for a reasonable amount of time. I have since removed all Google apps from my phone. I purchased a Starling Home Hub[1] (works great btw) which controls my Nest thermostats, which will not be replaced with a Nest product when Google inevitably kills them too early.
Nest was such a great product and brand, and Google completely fucked it up.
Reasonable amount of time is an understatement I purchased an Apple Airport router probably over ten years ago for my parents and it still works flawlessly to this day and receives security updates despite it being discontinued for five years now. The older version has been discontinued longer and it too still receives iirc.
We are in the same boat, my friend. We bought a Nest Secure, Cameras and the Nest Yale Deadbolt because of their connectivity... Then Google randomly axes support for the Secure, instantly nixing the reason why we bought the Deadbolt. The Nest app is also CONSTANTLY bugging us to switch to the Google Home app. I didn't purchase Nest items to use with the Google Home app!
I wouldn't say there was a definitive final straw. It was more of a death by a thousand cuts. Everything getting shittier and worse over time. Pixel phones originally were great, but I really wanted a great 1st party watch. Pixel Watch finally came out and it was lightyears behind the Apple Watch.
Software integration wise across the entire ecosystem as well. Google has been promising it, but Apple seems to have actually delivered it.
The Nest stuff hurts though. I've invested well over $3k in various Nest devices over the years, and to see what Google has done to the ecosystem is a shame.
Apples “move to ads” is barely noticeable (today)… like Googles product strategy.
But yes they’re moving into ads. It seems to be “over the top” revenue for them, not a core revenue stream like Google. Apple is basically taking any free internet connected endpoint they provide and tossing ads in (news in stock app, App Store, etc?). It’s annoying but it’s nowhere near as invasive or impactful as any other advertising giant (Google, Meta, Amazon, etc). They’re also way less invasive at tracking you - but they’re as equally opaque at telling you.
I'm new on the "Won't buy another Pixel phone". Both my wife's and my phones (5a) just died out of the blue, within a few months of each other. Hers just a day before warranty expired. I'd had niggles with an earlier generation Pixel that had me starting to ask questions about future purchases, but the 5a experience really put the nail in that coffin.
It was a pain to get mine repaired by them. They sent me to a "local" repair shop (40ish minutes drive away), who despite being their only authorized repair shop in the area, couldn't get any parts off Google for it, and wouldn't for months to come (and indicated this is just a constant story for them, and that what I was seeing was very common). Google essentially wasted a bunch of my time driving back and forth to repair shops. Then I had to send it to them and it sat unacknowledged (despite having delivery confirmation) for well over a week. They did at least send me a complete replacement, but my assumption has to be it's going to do exactly the same thing again.
For my wife's phone, they argued that because I clicked a wrong button in their repair website despite logging the phone as broken in time that it died after the warranty expired. I had a long argument with them, then gave up and decided I'd take my trade elsewhere.
In both cases, their attitude towards me as a customer was absolute bullshit. I've never had to work so hard to get someone to acknowledge that a phone could stop working, without having done anything to it.
I like the hardware and the pure Android experience as an end user. I'm not willing to deal with hostile customer support to get it.
The 5a has a failure problem[1]. Both of ours failed as well. After the second failure I demanded an Advanced Exchange rather than deal with the repair shop that has no parts in stock. Google replaced my 5a with a 6a immediately. It was a much different experience than waiting a month for the first repair (which failed). I would never accept anything other than an Advanced Exchange at this point.
In what way did it die? My wifes 4a stopped reading the sim card, any sim card. Even after a factory reset. Its over two years old and I haven't bothered to try and argue for a replacement yet. She's moved to Samsung Flip as its even smaller (when folded) and not a pixel.
Really disappointing, I've never had the sim card reader just fail like that. I guess its a cheap component thats died.
I have a 6a, but it was a pretty hard decision to buy it, because the "your Pixel 3a no longer gets security updates less than 3 years after you bought it, even though the hardware is still absolutely fine and has some features the 6a is missing" was a bitter pill to swallow...
I accidentally dropped my new (at the time) Pixel 4a and broke one of the camera lenses a day before I needed to fly out to India (from Dallas).
If I had an iPhone, I would roll up into an Apple Store and get a new device on the spot, no questions asked. It would fully restore a backup of my old phone within a hour, and I'd forget it ever happened.
But I had a Pixel.
Google doesn't have Google Stores (they did have one in NYC, but it was mostly a pop-up to show off their stuff staffed by contractors), so I was relegated to their chat support. They told me I needed to take it to a local UBreakIFix to get the lens repaired. Since it would take them two days to get the part and replace it, I landed up buying an iPhone instead.
It's really sad because, like you, I desperately wanted to run a 100% Google stack years and years ago.
I don't understand how a company with basically unlimited resources and the best people in the world just completely flops on product strategy time and time again.
Yeah. I assumed if any company can really nail this experience long term it would be google. I figured it would take longer but with how game changing many of their products were in the early 2010s, I was ok waiting.
That waiting turned into more and more beloved products being shut down, drastically changed to shell versions of themselves, or left to stagnate, while google continued to randomly launch, acquire, shut down other beloved brands.
>completely flops on product strategy time and time again.
I am not aware of a single product person in Google. They are very much a tech company. They make / research and develop technology and search for a solution.
Sometimes I feel like I'm becoming a bit of a Luddite. This is one of the reasons any hardware I put in my house is local only or local first if I can't get away with it.
I use Gmail and Youtube and that's about it. ok I use Chrome too but I also use Firefox and Brave as well.
I'm much more locked into Apple's ecosystem but at least Apple works very hard to ensure compatibility and supports hardware for many more years than Google does (with updates, etc.)
Apple support software longterm too. It’s still message and FaceTime. During that time Google went from google talk, gtalk, voice, hangout, allo, duo, meet, wave, google chat, etc.
I continue to refuse my Nest app's demand that I "upgrade" from my old Nest account to my Google account. Perhaps there are more advanced features I don't know about that no longer work, but the strategy of keeping away from Google "upgrades" has worked well for me.
I have a Nest V3 Thermostat (my second one, after I moved recently I installed one in the new house again, it's still the most beautiful OpenTherm thermostat out there, not that there are any other good options, just read the reviews).
I've been reading "Build" by Tony Fadell. It's just painful to read what Nest could have been. The V3 is nice, but there are still rough edges, the app loads slowly for example (no doubt because it needs data from the device via a cloud). And it is absolutely ridiculous how much trouble it is to let it talk to Home Assistant. Of course Tony is focused on the normal users (who just want stuff to work together, they don't care about open local APIs or Matter for example), which is a shame but understandable.
At this point: Please Google just opensource the firmware or something, add a local api and be done with it. It feels like they just don't want to support the device. Such a shame, it's such a nice thermostat (hardware-wise an ethernet cable to the heatlink would have been nice, to optionally drop the dependency on wireless, I'd pay for that).
Google WiFi had a local API for config and status etc. But it appeared to be single threaded and some API calls took 30s+, while all others queued up behind.
Nobody can build a nice app based on such an API. The official app tried - there were spinners on every part of the UI. Even simple things like 'give me a graph of network bandwidth' would have gaps in the graph where the single threaded service was bogged down with other requests.
After using a 3rd gen for 8 years, I just replaced my Nest 3rd gens with Ecobee Premiums. Used to be a proud Nest user, they even shaped my choice of a new home HVAC system to be something compatible. However, they (and their software) haven't changed since I bought them, they are stuck in 2015. Meanwhile Ecobee has been producing beautiful hardware and software that has not only caught up but surpassed the 5+ year headstart that Google/Nest squandered.
Also read Build and I'm sure Tony is just sad at seeing the opportunity lost as Nest becomes a shell of itself.
> Meanwhile Ecobee has been producing beautiful hardware and software that has not only caught up but surpassed the 5+ year headstart that Google/Nest squandered.
Ecobee released their first smart thermostat 3 years prior to the first Nest Thermostat. (Not that that's a fault, I've been a happy ecobee user for years.)
I emailed Ecobee years ago if they were available here in the Netherlands and if they were considering it. They said they were looking at it...
It's a shame, Fadell was right to go into the thermostat market. Honeywell still has nothing that looks nice, and, according to the reviews, nothing that functions well. The stuff that comes with HVAC systems are generally expensive but cheap feeling and imho ugly.
In the EU all manufacturers have to support OpenTherm, an open standard, so you'd think this is a big homogeneous market to enter...
170 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 230 ms ] threadInter-product-area rivalries/competitions/dysfunctions. Product manager attention span problems. High ego, high-status engineers with nice new technological hammers (e.g. Flutter, Fuchsia, Dart) that absolutely need to find nails, so go take other people's projects to rewrite.
Working in Home / Nest PA was very trying on the patience. They were bad for it, but the problem is endemic to anything user-facing at Google (see also Play Music vs YouTube Music, ChromeOS vs Android, Android Things, etc. etc.)
Google has a bunch of managers all vying to get their own promotions and will not hesitate to fuck over both users and other teams just for their moment of glory at Google I/O. And all of this stems from the fact that there's no leadership at Google, with an absolute inability to rally troops together on a single, common goal.
Behind all that stuff is an incredibly competent smart SRE team keeping the lights on and keeping things very efficient and reliable. And some boring but diligent SWEs writing the rather boring code to do all that boring stuff. That's what the real Google is, but it's invisible to the public.
But all that ads money needs to be spent somewhere. And you can't grow your staff forever doing "boring" stuff. And if there's an exciting interesting project inside Google it's flies to shit, people stepping over each other for promotion.
AFAIK they fixed the infighting more than a decade ago. That's why you don't see it causing problems. But also AFAIK (because I was never there), forced competition got all the way into single developers.
It is science :-)
Conway's law: ..complex products end up "shaped like" the organizational structure they are designed in or designed for. The law is applied primarily in the field of software architecture, though Conway directed it more broadly and its assumptions and conclusions apply to most technical fields.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
but "shipping the org chart" really explains a lot of tech good and bad.
When sj was at apple, product was well-integrated software and hardware (as he ruled the org chart, which left no space for rivalries and fiefdoms)
with every sh*tty iot device that phones home, marketing in the org chart makes for a monetized, not-private mess for customers.
Even if their time and attention were finite, they inspired a credible worry throughout the company that they might suprisingly appear and demand answers on why a team is @$&@ing up tech / UX, as PMs/VPs rightly asked themselves "Do I want to be explaining my behavior to X?"
Which seemed to tamp down on the amount of inter-fiefdom rivalries and wasted time.
I don't get the impression many people are worried about Pichai breathing tech/ UX fire from on high in the same way.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_in_being
Google's consumer products lack that. Google has an ad machine that just produces seemingly infinite cash. The hardware and consumer facing stuff is a sideshow. So it escapes project discipline.
For Google, it's hard to pretend to be the Good Guys when your main (and only) business is monopolizing internet ads.
To the contrary, Google culture (including, presumably, Pichai's views) is explicitly to try lots of competing ideas within Google and to disrupt from within. What other company would have Gmail and (previously) Inbox, multiple music services, a gazillion messaging apps, and so on?
This isn't a failure of management or accountability, this is consciously chosen policy at the highest levels. Resources go towards self-disruption by launching more new things in the same category, rather than choosing to focus on one and committing to it. This is why people are promoted for launches rather than for maintenance and support.
The upside is that Google launches way more products and could dramatically up its odds of success in a category. The downside is products fail because they don't get the support to see them through, consumers are totally confused by redundant products, and Google gets a reputation for cancelling products which might actually hinder future adoption (at least in some tech circles).
Obviously Google still seems to think the upside outweighs the downside... while many on HN come to the opposite conclusion. :)
E.g. the topical buying Nest, but then force folding it into Google Home
That's the opposite of letting the best solution among competing options win.
The broader issue is that it doesn't seem like there's a CEO who shows up in the Google Home's team meeting and live demos the broken and missing features, shows them on Nest, and then demands answers for why this wasn't done before they forced migration.
As has been quipped on here, Pichai seems to act more like a Google advocate who avoids rocking the internal boat, versus the rabid user advocate that Gates / Jobs / Bezos reportedly were.
And when there's no one you're afraid of at the top... of course the organization devolves into petty fiefdoms and bickering, at the expense of users.
They eventually choose to sunset one, and simplify brands, but in a really haphazard, broken-features way, just like we're seeing here.
But again, the issue isn't that the CEO's not checking up on the details. It's not one of quality control. It's that they don't care. It's not process, it's goals. I can't imagine Sundar wasn't briefed that the migration will involve missing features, and he signed off on that.
Because Google's core values are about trying lots of new things, with a focus on scalability and search and machine learning and metrics. Google's core values are very specifically not about maintaining consistent quality, committing to products, or guaranteeing features -- or being a "user advocate" as you mention.
So this is all just to reiterate. These aren't process failures. These are Google's processes working as intended. The Nest failures here are simply a reflection of Google's actual goals.
That makes it impossible to ship their organogram.
Apple seems to have escaped it mostly by centralizing power, but I don't think they are currently keeping it.
And what is obviously missing from this scenario is anyone in the Google organization that has the slightest care or concern for any customer need. Also strongly correlates with their obvious zero customer support / you-re-on-your-own practices. The entire company is just "what can we foist off on them this week?".
> I will not invest money in equipment operated by Google.
?
Because what you have now seems inconsistent.
[0]: https://9to5google.com/2023/01/21/fuchsia-area-120-google-la...
1) New build system for Android, because https://xkcd.com/927/
2) Security architectural changes that patch theoretical issues of the 7th dimension, and mess up all existing apps unless the developer rewrites 80% of the codebase
3) Pixel n+1 with more mega-everything (megapixels, megabytes of memory, megahertz per cpu, etc)
The Ring with a similar vantage point detects it every time.
It's absolutely breathtaking how bad Google is at shipping functioning software. I don't know how Rick Osterloh or Rishi Chandra still have jobs, but they should answer for the following litany of catastrophic product decisions:
* Google decides to abandon Nest as a separate, highly-prized brand and product line, and instead bring everything under the Google Home umbrella. This process is excruciating and a monumental, half-decade-long failure. It is the very definition of a legacy rewrite pattern gone awry, but coupled with billions of dollars of purchased, installed hardware in people's actual homes.
* This starts with the "force Nest users to have a Google account to use Nest" and "Googlekill Works With Nest" decisions. Google decides to gate certain features and to encourage people to upgrade to the Google Home implementation of the Nest functionality, but completely left feature parity a decade behind.
To wit, Google Home's app, beyond being buggy, also can't do basic things like allow for easy scrubbing of video feeds, or control of the Nest Protect smoke detectors.
* Google also willfully murders Works With Nest, and kills with it the goodwill of hundreds of manufacturers who were pretty excited to build compatible products and services. This is migrated to a Works with Google/Assistant product that... again, completely lacks parity. They break the Home/Away functionality entirely. They delay this process a bit, and Works with Google catches up in some ways, but it takes literal years.
* Google releases a new line of Nest Cams that... don't work with the Nest app. Indeed, you have to activate them in the Google Home app, and their feeds will not display in the Nest app. From a Product Manager perspective, this is very easy to back into: Google is on a slow, death-march termination of the Nest app, in favor of migrating to Google Home. Rather than building any new functionality into the Nest app (these new cams included battery and floodlight functions, for example), they decided it made more sense to force users to use the Google Home app.
Except... the Google Home app STILL lacks parity with the now-8-year-old Nest app. The Google Home app, as of May the 8th in the year of our lord 2023, does not support the fantastic SightView video scrubbing functionality. Or, as it happens, ANY scrubbing functionality. It doesn't support the ability to generate and download video clips. And the web version, which has been in a public preview for over a year, STILL doesn't support the ability to even view the pre-tagged movement sessions that you can view in the mobile app.
But to say this again: new Nest Cam users cannot view 100% of the video recorded by the Nest Cams. It is functionally impossible and completely ridiculous, considering the Dropcam/earlier Nest Cams have been able to do this for literally a decade.
* Beyond that sheer lunacy, Rick Osterloh gets up on stage and has the temerity to announce with a big dumb grin on his face the Nest Doorbell: the "upgrade" (in literally no metric) from the older Nest Hello. This product has two variants: a wired and battery powered version, for people who don't have doorbell wiring. The wired product manages to ship into end users' hands with a curious limitation: even when wired, the product is INCAPABLE of recording 24-hour footage. Note that the Nest Hello, launched in 2017, supported this functionality out of the box and still does. When pressed for a reason, Rick says that the thermals were a limitation, coupled with how thin they wanted to make the product.
I'll say this again slowly: for some reason, a Product Manager at Google thought that the THINNESS of a PERMANENTLY INSTALLED, FIXED LOCATION VIDEO DOORBELL was more important than its ability to actually record video reliably. How on earth do...
I played a minor bit role in shipping the original Nest Home Hubs. They sold like hotcakes. Huge success. Was kind of proud of them despite all their technical warts internally. Within a few months of launch they were already rewriting the whole UI and OS stack (Fuchsia, Flutter). Which was predictably literally years late by the time it shipped, and now of course they're killing the whole line. And the whole time we were working on the original product it was in brutal internal competition with a similar product built on Android but which was a total commercial failure and relegated to disinterested third parties (and just got finally taken off life support)
It really is like nobody there had ever read any foundational software engineering planning texts. The arrogance and incompetence is outstanding, especially when you notice how incredibly smart all the people working on it are, but behave collectively stupid.
But I wanted to clarify about video recording and viewing 100% of clips:
there are two service levels from Google: either you’re grandfathered on older pricing plans per camera and can see a 24/7 recording or you upgrade to new plans per household that they sell now where the camera only records and sends motion or sounds, not 24/7 feed recordings like the old Dropcam used to.
You can’t buy the old way of recording 24/7 from every camera as far as I know, and the only reason I can think of that they switched recording modes is because it saves power and is more efficient so hardware might not break as often via overheating. I mean, they might claim it is more efficient for storage, but they have stationary cameras - compression has to be good, right?
Anyway, just pointing out that generating clips from video recordings is kind of the old way, and the new way is that it somehow automatically makes clips for you as motion alerts.
But… outside of that I agree 100% that Nest has been basically dead since the rebranding. That Ecobee still has any unique features Google doesn’t have largely stems from this lack of innovation.
Ecobee is now owned by a company that makes generators, the kind that runs on gas or diesel. It’s hard to imagine that Google can’t ship new features, apps or software products faster than a company that makes industrial appliances and yet here we are.
Google makes too much money from ads to care about any other way to make money, long term. I’m shocked they don’t just give away these smart devices and wire them up to play YouTube ads with facial recognition at this point.
Maybe they’re waiting for Amazon to try it first, or want to experiment with Google TV ads like Fire TV and Samsung already do. If my Apple TV ever starts auto-playing trailers and ads, I’m going to permanently switch to using AirPlay, I think.
As for the Dropcam, maybe I’ll replace it with an iCloud video camera when the time comes…
Without knowing, I'd expect Bosch and all the others to have a similar product, just five years late, slightly more expensive due to more realistic accounting, extremely boring, and without any of the shortcomings that GP has listed. Those are the ones that will last for decades. Their apps will never be amazing, but they'll last.
Many years ago, I bought a bunch of Chromecast Audio devices - these are/were little wifi dongles with a 3.5mm jack and USB power. I could set them up as a group and they'd sync perfectly with each other. I had a pretty cheap multi-room sound system.
Then at some point, the Google app I was using for them stopped working and it transpired the functionality had been moved to "Google Home". Over the following few months I spent hours turning the things off and on again, resetting them, re-creating groups, but it never worked for more than a few hours. I gave up, went back to bluetooth.
Google Home needs to die.
Also surprises me no one hits Google for their environmental hypocrisy when we're talking about purely induced e-waste here. The fact that the Nest Detects and Nest Guards are being made useless is so galling to me. Replacing them with an objectively worse option is the Google piss on the shit sundae.
Had the old Nest thermostat and a few cameras for ~7 years. All worked pretty well with the Nest app.
I moved and bought the cheaper Nest thermostat E ~18 months ago, and it is without a doubt, the worst thermostat I have ever seen. First, it won't even run without being connected to the Google Home app. Then, app setup would fail repeatedly with a generic "Failed to setup" message. I had to get on Reddit to discover it doesn't work with G Workspace accounts.
And after all of that, the touch controls are next to impossible to use. And they somehow managed to make setting the temperature incredibly confusing. Like using an app should make that easier, but it is far, far harder than the on-device config screen on the Honeywell thermostat from 2004. It's.... I don't understand.
THEN, last week, something happened and I can no longer access any of the old Nest stuff in Google Home. It was in a separate Google account, and everything just disappeared. And Google wants me to verify access to that account using some bizarre onetime code setting buried in my phone, which repeatedly fails. So I can't use any of that stuff either.
I hate ranting on the internet, but wow this has gotten out of hand.
I wish these companies had some sort of open source pact built into the licensing, eg after 3 years the support window ends but the software becomes open source. We won't solve your problems anymore but you/the community can if you want.
That would be amazing...
Overall, I'm a huge fan of Google in many areas, but the amount of unforced errors they've made is undeniable.
I don't care that they "kill" lots of services, but it does sting when they screw up something good.
Rather than an exhaustive list of every minor app/service/feature they've eliminated, what are their biggest screw ups?
1) Chat 2) Google Reader 3) Google Buzz 4) Nest/Home 5) Pay/Wallet 6) ???
In what specific ways has Google failed its customers with Nest products? Is it just the app (the only thing mentioned in the article)?
The Nest smoke alarms at a friend’s house say (as in play over the speakers a voice saying) “Remote access attempt detected” every so often while we’re sitting in the living room. At least twice a year they go off in the middle of the night (without smoke).
So I guess when you’re contacting customers who don’t want it, and your alarms wrongly sound, I would say you have a problem with your false positive rate
I’d happily pay a premium for smoke alarms less prone to false alarms, but none such exist as far as I can tell.
We replaced with this: https://www.lowes.com/pd/First-Alert-3120B-6-Pack-AC-Hardwir...
You may want to swap type of smoke alarms (photoelectric vs ionization): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_detector#Design
The other may be better suited for your environment (e.g. humidity, particulates, etc).
I've never had a false alarm with the "smooth edge" First Alert model, for example: https://www.amazon.com/Detector-Hardwired-Battery-Backup-6-P...
And have had it go off when the daughter lit a candle underneath, so know it works!
I just hope they don't screw up self driving cars, where they're actually succeeding.
Turns out they only learn for the first few weeks. After three calls with tech support, we reset it enough times that it learned how to turn on the heat by 11am on weekdays.
Perhaps someday someone will have the patience to try and get auto-learning working on the weekends too.
I gave up and just have Alexa do time based automations to set temperatures. At least until google kills the nest api.
I always found it funny how google’s “AI” is so stupid when it comes to user satisfaction instead of making them money.
I'll never trust them again with locking myself into their ecosystem. The worry is when you buy into something like Nest, who later go on to be brought into Google.
Obviously one cannot prevent things like that from happening, but when they do, you can decide to migrate to something else and just sell your existing (now Google) gear, to avoid Googley issues down the line.
It may be cynical, but at that point the resale value might still be good because not everyone has caught on to Google being Google like this.
Of course the web-connected parts like positioning on a map or sharing online broke long ago, but they appear to have neglected to build in a kill switch so mere user me can keep on getting shit done, invulnerable to their idiocy-of-the-day
I've got a precious Lightroom 6 license so I've been sticking with that.
For the record I used to be a huge Google fan. Had many of the Pixel phones, had Nest cameras, doorbells, nest secure, nest protects, multiple TV's running Android TV, Stadia (lol), and more.
Google TV is unusable for 10-30s of refresh depending on how long it has been since you’ve used the TV. It’s the worst part of an otherwise high end TV. The multiple user UX is odd across Google products. You can haplessly sign in to your account for YouTube TV on another family member’s Google (TV) account without it bringing up an account switcher. About five minutes into you wondering why your settings are off (or being annoyed because you realized what happened) you get Google’s suggestion to press the right combination of buttons on the remote to do so. Then you switch accounts and sit through the 30s of account refresh. It’s death by a thousand cuts.
Roku is great. It does what you ask. Settings are remembered. The Roku Ultra 4K upscaler produces a great image. I used it to replace the Samsung experience on one of their first Gen OLED TVs that still produces a great image in spite of its slowly failing software stack.
Samsung seems to simply give up on updating the software on the TV at some point. Things start failing over time as services move on past your TV’s software stack. My newer Frame TV is on the newest software stack (for now) and everything works fine in comparison. Probably my biggest annoyance is the laggy UI and that they try really hard to direct you to their free TV channel. You were watching YouTube the last time you watched the TV, but nevermind that. Samsung wants to show you a loud TV show from the 50s on their classic TV channel. Or KPop. Or Hells Kitchen. Not sure why but that is what my Samsung TVs cycle through.
Realize it's cat and mouse with an updatable controlled platform's data exfiltration, but curious if there are any low-maintenance solutions to do some good?
Agree that Rokus are a great solution, but I'm uncomfortable with a one-time-purchase device's long-term revenue priorities.
[0] https://www.nextdns.io
Also remember that if you’re using cloud TV services, you’re just moving the data aggregation/ad network integrations/resale to that service.
Does that work okay? I would worry that you needed an iOS app to configure it or something. It works as a totally stand-alone device?
I currently have a Sony one with Android TV that I bought in 2017 and software wise it's unusable. I have Apple TV setup for all the media apps and that works well enough though.
My flagship LG oled screen has modal ads that are pushed to my screen when it starts up.
Nest was such a great product and brand, and Google completely fucked it up.
[1]https://www.starlinghome.io/
I wouldn't say there was a definitive final straw. It was more of a death by a thousand cuts. Everything getting shittier and worse over time. Pixel phones originally were great, but I really wanted a great 1st party watch. Pixel Watch finally came out and it was lightyears behind the Apple Watch.
Software integration wise across the entire ecosystem as well. Google has been promising it, but Apple seems to have actually delivered it.
The Nest stuff hurts though. I've invested well over $3k in various Nest devices over the years, and to see what Google has done to the ecosystem is a shame.
But yes they’re moving into ads. It seems to be “over the top” revenue for them, not a core revenue stream like Google. Apple is basically taking any free internet connected endpoint they provide and tossing ads in (news in stock app, App Store, etc?). It’s annoying but it’s nowhere near as invasive or impactful as any other advertising giant (Google, Meta, Amazon, etc). They’re also way less invasive at tracking you - but they’re as equally opaque at telling you.
It was a pain to get mine repaired by them. They sent me to a "local" repair shop (40ish minutes drive away), who despite being their only authorized repair shop in the area, couldn't get any parts off Google for it, and wouldn't for months to come (and indicated this is just a constant story for them, and that what I was seeing was very common). Google essentially wasted a bunch of my time driving back and forth to repair shops. Then I had to send it to them and it sat unacknowledged (despite having delivery confirmation) for well over a week. They did at least send me a complete replacement, but my assumption has to be it's going to do exactly the same thing again.
For my wife's phone, they argued that because I clicked a wrong button in their repair website despite logging the phone as broken in time that it died after the warranty expired. I had a long argument with them, then gave up and decided I'd take my trade elsewhere.
In both cases, their attitude towards me as a customer was absolute bullshit. I've never had to work so hard to get someone to acknowledge that a phone could stop working, without having done anything to it.
I like the hardware and the pure Android experience as an end user. I'm not willing to deal with hostile customer support to get it.
[1] https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/11833075?hl=en
In what way did it die? My wifes 4a stopped reading the sim card, any sim card. Even after a factory reset. Its over two years old and I haven't bothered to try and argue for a replacement yet. She's moved to Samsung Flip as its even smaller (when folded) and not a pixel.
Really disappointing, I've never had the sim card reader just fail like that. I guess its a cheap component thats died.
Picked it up off the my desk to going use it, and it was powered off, never turned back on again.
Wife woke up to hers dead.
If I had an iPhone, I would roll up into an Apple Store and get a new device on the spot, no questions asked. It would fully restore a backup of my old phone within a hour, and I'd forget it ever happened.
But I had a Pixel.
Google doesn't have Google Stores (they did have one in NYC, but it was mostly a pop-up to show off their stuff staffed by contractors), so I was relegated to their chat support. They told me I needed to take it to a local UBreakIFix to get the lens repaired. Since it would take them two days to get the part and replace it, I landed up buying an iPhone instead.
I don't understand how a company with basically unlimited resources and the best people in the world just completely flops on product strategy time and time again.
That waiting turned into more and more beloved products being shut down, drastically changed to shell versions of themselves, or left to stagnate, while google continued to randomly launch, acquire, shut down other beloved brands.
I am not aware of a single product person in Google. They are very much a tech company. They make / research and develop technology and search for a solution.
I'm much more locked into Apple's ecosystem but at least Apple works very hard to ensure compatibility and supports hardware for many more years than Google does (with updates, etc.)
I've been reading "Build" by Tony Fadell. It's just painful to read what Nest could have been. The V3 is nice, but there are still rough edges, the app loads slowly for example (no doubt because it needs data from the device via a cloud). And it is absolutely ridiculous how much trouble it is to let it talk to Home Assistant. Of course Tony is focused on the normal users (who just want stuff to work together, they don't care about open local APIs or Matter for example), which is a shame but understandable.
At this point: Please Google just opensource the firmware or something, add a local api and be done with it. It feels like they just don't want to support the device. Such a shame, it's such a nice thermostat (hardware-wise an ethernet cable to the heatlink would have been nice, to optionally drop the dependency on wireless, I'd pay for that).
Nobody can build a nice app based on such an API. The official app tried - there were spinners on every part of the UI. Even simple things like 'give me a graph of network bandwidth' would have gaps in the graph where the single threaded service was bogged down with other requests.
Also read Build and I'm sure Tony is just sad at seeing the opportunity lost as Nest becomes a shell of itself.
Ecobee released their first smart thermostat 3 years prior to the first Nest Thermostat. (Not that that's a fault, I've been a happy ecobee user for years.)
It's a shame, Fadell was right to go into the thermostat market. Honeywell still has nothing that looks nice, and, according to the reviews, nothing that functions well. The stuff that comes with HVAC systems are generally expensive but cheap feeling and imho ugly.
In the EU all manufacturers have to support OpenTherm, an open standard, so you'd think this is a big homogeneous market to enter...
They seems to be dropping the ball across a big range of businesses, including ads and search
Leadership seems to be struggling and employees not happy
Where is google going and why is their stock going up?