Thank you! Adding that to my (admittedly large) tbr pile.
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I personally get a lot of value out of home automation. I can appreciate that not everyone does and I certainly wouldn’t force it on anyone (except maybe my family, though they’re good sports about it). Saying to just go back to old tech is missing the point, though. We can do these things right, and I don’t think it’s too much to ask for that to happen. I think one of the reasons people are so upset with Hue is that historically they’ve been very high quality and have had a high level of compatibility with home automation ecosystems (I currently use Home Assistant, but have used them successfully with other systems in the past). They are far from the cheapest, but they have been one of the best. Now they’re likely to be the most expensive and one of the worst (even if I can use the bulbs without their hub I won’t buy any more of their products).
On a related note, I did lodge a complaint with Hue over this and someone called me. I expected a black hole or at best a generic email, so I did take that as a positive sign. I don’t know if they’ll actually reverse course after listening to their customers, and if course the customer service associate who called me didn’t have much more to say beyond telling me that they were collecting and forwarding on the feedback they were receiving. Still, it does leave me cautiously optimistic, though even if they do reverse course, I’m not sure that will be sufficient to rebuild trust with me. Even if I do buy their stuff again, it won’t be with the same level of satisfaction.
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But the clever ones add a key step
- Introduce
- Propagate
- Lock in
- Enshittify
- Stripmine (increasingly for AI training data)
- Introduce new replacement service or product and migrate as many as possible to step 1 on the new product cycle
- Abandon old service - Rinse and repeat ad infinitum
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That, alone, seems revolutionary to me, given what most CS operations are like when I say that I don’t want to make a formal complaint I just want my feedback to be fed to management.
I know it won’t happen, they know I know it won’t happen, so often enough it becomes a formal complaint. They do at least have to deal with those (especially if they are in any regulated industry).
Honestly I prefer things that are turned off, to actually be turned off, as in “not using any electricity”.
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Wait until they go to 2FA to verify a lightswitch flip.
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All hail the growing reading piling! 
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Was just talking about doing a few rooms up in Hue lights.
I guess I’m going to keep looking.
I’m old enough to remember when Philips made everything from TVs and radios to video game consoles, electric toothbrushes and - yes - light bulbs. Its decline into a patent hoarding also-ran is really sad.
A future alongside Kodak and Polaroid beckons.
Oooh, oooh, I get to post the obligatory Technology Connections link this time:
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