
Philips reverses decision to close the Hue Platform - alaaf
http://www.developers.meethue.com/content/friends-hue-program-update
======
mdip
A point brought up in the replies to their forum post warrants repeating: They
claim that they were concerned about the quality of their brand being eroded
by third-party bulbs that didn't reproduce the same quality experience that
first-party/certified bulbs did.

They had the solution available to them from day one. Since they can clearly
identify third-party bulbs, they could have simply presented a warning along
the lines of "We've detected you're using bulbs that are not certified by
Philips. For best results, we recommend using only certified bulbs (link to
purchase here) and cannot guarantee a quality experience with the bulbs you've
purchased. Click "OK" to continue."

~~~
culturestate
I don't think this would accomplish anything vis-a-vis brand protection, since
consumers have been conditioned to just click "OK" at every dialog box that
doesn't look like it will explode a mine. Six months down the line, nobody
would remember the warning -- they'd still get mad at Philips when a third-
party bulb breaks.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _they 'd still get mad at Philips when a third-party bulb breaks._

Would they? Wouldn't they blame their bulb first? It's like complaining to
your PC manufacturer that a program you downloaded doesn't work. Most people
would blame the program and look for another one. I'm sure there are some who
have it backwards, and they probably will be calling support, but I can't
imagine there's enough of them for a company to actually care about damage to
the brand those people may be doing.

~~~
jads
I've worked in tech support for many years, and the vast majority of people
_would_ blame the PC manufacturer or the operating system for the problems. I
spent many years on the Genius Bar (back in the PowerPC and early Intel days)
and, in almost, every interaction, the device was to blame - as far as the
customer was concerned. In some cases, they were right, in others it was due
to outdated software, buggy third-party drivers or just something they bought
that was not Mac compatible. But as far as the customer was concerned, it
didn't work so therefore it was a problem with their computer.

What has to be remembered is that the types of people who read Hacker News
would understand, in more detail, what might be causing the issue and know
troubleshooting is all part of the process. I bet printer companies get many
calls a day from people who bought third-party cartridges (sometimes without
realising) and complaining that their stupid printer isn't working and that it
must be the printer's fault.

The vast majority of consumers who would walk into an Apple Store or Best Buy
to purchase something like this, they just think of it as one big ecosystem.
If it doesn't work with a bulb they bought off the internet, they will simply
assume the product, as a whole, is terrible.

~~~
gmac
On the printer point, I once bought a 3rd-party cartridge for a Dell laser
printer that not only didn't work but actually broke the printer (it stopped
recognising all cartridges in that slot).

The first question they asked on the phone was whether I'd used a 3rd-party
cartridge. I said yes.

The second question was where I'd like the free replacement printer delivered
(now with added WiFi, and a full set of cartridges). Painful for Dell, but
I'll buy from them again.

~~~
ars
Your post makes we wonder if the printer broke on purpose with that 3rd party
cartridge, and that's why they sent you a new one.

------
mdip
I'm glad to see they've reversed the decision. It was the only reasonable
choice they had with such an immature market that could have them dethroned as
the leader very quickly. Their reasons for lock-in made no sense. For a
product like this _compatibility is a feature_ and many people chose the
Philips products because of the ecosystem of compatible products available,
the ZigBee protocol and third-party light bulbs.

I'm sure that third-party products were causing problems, however, wholesale
blocking of them via software update is a terrible solution. They, literally,
turned out the lights on their customers. Meanwhile, I'd be willing to bet
support costs _immediately_ spiked -- people call support when things don't
work and they just pushed out a solution that _increased_ rather than
decreased that.

Unfortunately, I think they've bruised their reputation quite a bit with this
move. It's now delayed my purchase of such a product until I am convinced that
they have a solid third-party certification program in place (with very low
licensing fees) or (even better) a guarantee with the product that they won't
try this again when the market is more mature and they have the option of
ignoring complaining customers.

Their competitors could see a rise in sales by taking advantage of this
blunder and committing to open protocols. I haven't looked at the landscape in
this category, yet, and had just assumed I'd be buying the Philips Hue
eventually, but they've motivated me to do more research.

~~~
pkgapkg
Their move concerned me, because now I don't know if this is "we won't close
our ecosystem" or "we won't close our ecosystem YET". I don't feel like waking
up and discovering that they've decided that they now have enough market share
to be abusive and controlling. Most of my existing ZigBee stuff isn't as slick
as the Hue stuff, but I know it won't get turned off.

I get that people make mistakes, but their original move showed that Philips
has essentially NO understanding of their market, and that they are willing to
casually engage in extraordinary hostility towards their customers. This isn't
a winning combination.

------
themartorana
Wow. Most companies are deaf to user outrage. The original decision wasn't
fantastic, but I understand the whole "Friends of..." certification route.

At least in the future they'll be able to stick to "if it's not certified by
us..." for customer support, which was likely the original impetus (along with
a desire to cut off cheap alternatives to their devices).

I'm not mad at this at all.

~~~
eveningcoffee
_I 'm not mad at this at all. _

I am. Because it is a way to extort money out of other ZigBee participants.

~~~
rubidium
It's not extorting. It's making sure your house doesn't burn down because you
bought the el cheapo bulb from knockoff brand C.

~~~
raverbashing
Pray tell how does a LED Lamp can burn your house down

Oh wait it can't (if it can because your wiring is crap and the protection
devices are not working you have much bigger problems)

~~~
TeMPOraL
A LED bulb converts your 230V AC (or 110V in the US) power source into 12V DC
(in case of Hue itself). This converter part can, if poorly made, create a
fire hazard. And a bulb is usually mounted inside a lamp, many of which are
flammable and have the shape that will accumulate heat inside instead of
dissipating it.

~~~
raverbashing
Yes, but that applies to china mobile chargers and a lot of other devices that
nobody worries about (and also to CFDs and any led lamp that might be today in
your house)

And of course it's not a software issue

~~~
WorldMaker
> And of course it's not a software issue

Funny thing though, but that AC/DC converter is manipulated by firmware
activated by a wifi protocol. If the fire only starts when the converter is
activated into its highest conversion rate in a particular sequence by certain
commands sent across that wifi protocol and those commands are being chosen by
a user of an app on a mobile device two rooms away, is that a software issue?
It's certainly a gray area.

~~~
raverbashing
If your DC/DC converter has a duty-cycle of 100% most likely the controlling
FET will burn out and stop working

------
HarryHirsch
Compare this with Ethernet. You plug it in - and it just works. No
3com/Realtek/Intel certification required. As a user I may be shielded, but I
believe there are no interoperability issues between Cisco/Juniper/Brocade
switchgear either.

With this as the background, it's surprising to see a large crowd defending
the equivalent of Ford-branded gasoline.

~~~
fastball
Apples and oranges.

Pure hardware is a lot easier to make compatible consistently than
hardware+software.

~~~
CydeWeys
Huh? There's a _lot_ of software involved in wired networking. Way more than
for lightbulbs, I'd suspect. And yet they all interoperate via open standards,
and any vendor that tried to sell equipment that only worked with their own
equipment would be laughed at of the market.

~~~
fastball
An ethernet cable does not contain any software. A smart lightbulb does.

~~~
CydeWeys
But now you've drawn an irrelevant comparison. The power line and socket that
the smart lightbulb is connected to don't contain any software. _Those_ are
the parts that are analogous to a simple Ethernet wire (which is really just
eight separate leads instead of three). The smart lightbulb itself is
analogous to a router.

------
DiabloD3
The thing is, to me, the fact that they ever decided to do this in the first
place means I will never buy Philips smart home products ever.

They have proven they can't be trusted with this sort of power, and that is a
one way trip. You don't come back from that, you don't get back off my list.

~~~
rubidium
Either A) You don't trust any large, publically traded company. B) You don't
understand how large, publically traded companies work.

This decision was made by someone in marketing. Phillips engineers (in this
division) were ambivalent because it meant less verification and testing
(yea!) but also means they have a less capable product. It got approved
because someone (likely a director somewhere) put together a market strategy
that showed they could make x dollars in the next 2 years doing this.

Public backlash was bigger than expected. VP gets involved. Decision is
changed.

~~~
rrrx3
The decision to only support Philips products came most likely from the
engineering division themselves. Marketing probably had a shit-fit because
losing a marketable feature is a giant regression to your general user.

People in Marketing and Product tend to be way more in-tune with customers and
don't make boneheaded decisions like this. Another easy tell: the company was
shocked by the reaction of users. That meant the company wasn't aware of user
impressions of the decision. That also meant Product/Marketing teams weren't
involved in the decision.

When the "what does it cost us to test this compatibility" calculus comes out
as more expensive than "what is the cost of the backlash to our company," you
realize that Engineering divisions without enough resources are driving this
type of decision, 99 times out of 100.

~~~
CydeWeys
> The decision to only support Philips products came most likely from the
> engineering division themselves.

I disagree. I don't see engineers coming up with or getting on-board with such
a clearly anti-open-standards decision. Much more likely, what I think
happened is that this decision was forced on engineering from above, morale
hit all-time lows, there was much grumbling and consternation as they
implemented this anti-feature that they clearly didn't believe in, then they
rejoiced at the huge public outcry when the change was pushed, and are now
celebrating that those assholes up in management had to reverse course with a
heavy dose of "I told you so".

Source: I am an engineer at a big company and have seen this scenario play out
many times internally.

~~~
throwaway2048
Read the comments here, many engineering types are falling all over each other
to excuse phillips. There is a massive anti-sentiment towards open platforms
there days it seems, likely driven by apple's success and the startup
"industry".

~~~
jhall1468
Because a practicing engineer and an anonymous person on the internet that
seems like the "engineering type" is the same thing?

There is zero reason for an engineer to have "anti-sentiment" to an open
platform because it's moot. Most likely, an engineer would be completely
indifferent to a decision like this.

------
anc84
They can still control it and reverse the reversal in the future. You are at
their whim. It is not user-friendly unless it is free software (and hardware).
Amazon can still remotely remove books and no one bats an eye. This is just an
issue because at the moment these kinds of home automation are per-dominantly
"nerd" territory while e-book readers are already mainstream.

~~~
fastball
Where is this magical place where I can find free hardware?

~~~
stefs
To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not
as in “free beer”.

~~~
umanwizard
GP's point still stands. Open hardware is very rare.

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

~~~
gnulnx
Hey, give them some credit. They listened to their customers and responded
very quickly.

~~~
sspiff
Exactly this. Their management / decision makers aren't familiar with the
hacker mindset, but they responded to public criticism quickly by acquiescing
to the demands. I don't so anything bad about this.

They mad a public about face, admitting that their decision was not the right
one for their audience, and changed it. That's not easy to do for most people,
let alone companies.

~~~
lightbritefight
They didnt really admit the decision was bad for the audience. They said
"well, we were just looking out for you, and highly recommend you doing what
we want, but I guess you can do that too, but you shouldnt."

The tone is very much "we did nothing wrong." I don't expect more, but I was
hoping for it.

~~~
jhall1468
I disagree. The tone was more akin to "This really doesn't impact _a lot_ of
our customers, but the customers it did impact caused a significant
(unexpected) response."

That's perfectly valid. They felt that it was a minority doing it (which is
probably true) so this would be a non-issue. It wasn't, so they reversed it.

------
nichochar
I really respect philips for having the humility to come back on a decision
like this. As someone who already owns hue and has bought into the ecosystem,
this makes me want to promote their brand further, and I will.

Hat down to whoever made this happen over there! The world is better when
things are open.

------
ohitsdom
"We underestimated the impact this would have upon the small number of our
customers"

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

~~~
joezydeco
Translation: "we'll do this to shut up the pro users that are generating all
this bad P/R, and it really doesn't matter since 99.9% of our customers won't
care about this anyway."

Can't say I disagree with the idea. Everyone wants a system like this to be
open on principle, but in reality it won't really get used that much. This
stuff is still too hard for the average consumer.

~~~
soylentcola
I dunno. I bought a Hue starter kit (hub+3 bulbs) and three more bulbs when I
moved into my new house. I wanted something cool and "gadgety" to set up in
the new place. They've generally been OK but I haven't bought any more bulbs
since that first setup two years ago.

This is mainly because the Hue bulbs are quite pricey and I've had a couple of
them semi-fail (some colors in the spectrum stop working due to the blue LEDs
crapping out). I've been keeping an eye out for compatible bulbs that are a
bit more affordable since Hue prices haven't dropped at all and I'm more
likely to drop $20-30 on a fancy bulb than another $60 when they can still
fail.

Granted, I've already got the hub so they have my money. Their risk is that I
only buy third party bulbs instead of Hue bulbs from now on. Still, the next
time I go to buy more lamps to expand my setup, if there are less expensive
options that are reasonably equivalent, I'll buy them instead anyway. If Hue
lamps become more affordable, I'll stick to first-party by default. But if
Hues are still $60 each and some other platform starts selling good RGB LED
bulbs for $15-25 each (and Hue has locked out third party bulbs), I'll just
drop Hue in general and cut my losses.

~~~
jon-wood
I got a couple of the OSRAM RGB bulbs a while back, and while they're not
quite as good as the Hue ones at half the price they were definitely the right
choice. The only really issue I have is that their colours don't match the Hue
ones, so it can be a bit hit and miss getting what you're looking for.

------
sneak
The funny part is that they claim to have broken their customers' previously
working functionality in good faith.

Who writes these things, and why do their supervisors allow them to keep
working there?!?

~~~
Gracana
It could be worse: "Some customers were involved in a darkness-related
incident."

~~~
Brian-Puccio
I'm not sure if this is a specific reference to something like McSweeney's
Interactive Guide to Ambiguous Grammar [0], to something else, or just a
comment in general. (But I agree.)

[0] [http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-interactive-guide-
to-a...](http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-interactive-guide-to-ambiguous-
grammar)

------
tomlongson
I wonder if this had anything to do with the flood of negative comments to
their Amazon product pages?

3/5 stars: [http://www.amazon.com/Philips-455303-White-Starter-
Generatio...](http://www.amazon.com/Philips-455303-White-Starter-
Generation/dp/B014H2OZAC/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1450292147&sr=8-2&keywords=philips+hue+hub)

4/5 stars (previously 4.5/5): [http://www.amazon.com/Philips-456210-Ambiance-
Starter-Genera...](http://www.amazon.com/Philips-456210-Ambiance-Starter-
Generation/dp/B014H2P4KW/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1450292147&sr=8-3&keywords=philips+hue+hub)

------
revelation
Not sure why people are screaming "boycott". Philips never advertised their
system as being compatible with third-party lights. The fact that they use an
open protocol to communicate with their own lights doesn't change this.

It's like connecting to your office chat with an IRC client because you
figured out that's what they are using under the hood. Why would you scream
bloody murder when one day your IRC client stops being compatible with it?
They never advertised this to begin with!

You can't exactly demand functionality that you were never sold.

~~~
HelloNurse
Not bothering to test and actively support devices from other vendors would be
reasonable, but customers have the expectation that a product does a decent
effort to respect the standard; whitelisting a subset of Philips lightbulbs
and deliberately refusing to work with anything else means giving users a bad
product for the sake of anticompetitive business practices. This kind of
deliberate, obviously harmful abuse is worse than merely reckless behaviour
like the Superfish scandal or the Windows 10 update that uninstalls user
software.

~~~
revelation
Except I don't think Philips advertised that they are using an open standard.
It's just what they used for the implementation.

They are free to mutilate that standard as they see fit for their own product,
and since they didn't make it into a selling point, there is no reason for
them to expect compatibility.

~~~
HelloNurse
In the world of customers who prefer trustworthy vendors, there's a
substantial difference between not wanting to spend money to respect a
standard any more than advertised, and deliberately spending money (firmware
updates aren't free) to worsen the product and screw customers.

Likewise, "mutilating" a standard to leverage standard technology in a not-
really-standard product isn't the same as deliberate artificial
incompatibility for purely commercial reasons.

------
gedrap
A lot of the people are talking about how important integration and
interoperability is. I agree with it, however, a lot of work has to be done to
achieve it.

In order to do it properly, there should be standards that major providers
agree upon making integration much easier and predictable. That takes plenty
of time.

Then you probably need some walled garden to control the experience. Approved
apps, approved 3rd party providers, etc. If some crappy app is released,
regular users won't blame the developer but the platform, as it was discussed
in great details in other threads. We need to get out of the HN bubble.
Seriously. We forget that a computer is a device to watch porn and browse
facebook and that's about it for A LOT of people. Chances are, it will cause a
wave of anger in communities such as this one (where there's a strong
sentiment for open systems).

This work has to be done be a number of large providers (read: long processes)
and followed by startups popping up and disappearing now and then. This stuff
always takes time.

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

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

------
vilts
Sounds exactly like the FTDI FT232 "serial killer" saga all over again.

They got many people very pissed off and probably never buying or building
products with their chips again.

------
toppy
How many developers does it take to change Philips lightbulb?

------
Nilef
Any recommendations for third-party lights?

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

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

