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.
> 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.
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 In some cases, they were right, in others it was due to outdated software, buggy third-party drivers or just something they bought that was not Mac compatible.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.
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.
Honestly, so what?! We've survived through 30 years of computing with this and somehow the big brands didn't implode. Why do we start compromising future technology due to some minority refusing to understand the basics of how their stuff works?
People calling tech support are a minority of users and do not represent the full market. It's really strange that smart people here are actually proposing making the product worse due to some loud incompetent individuals.
> 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.
Selection bias. The people coming to the genius bar obviously think there's something wrong with the computer.
yes, selection bias but the fact that he had a constant stream of people thinking that proves the point that many folks just don't have a freaking clue about how computers work or what's responsible for what.
No one is disputing that there are many people like that; the question is, how many in relation to more savvy customers, and whether this amount is in any way significant for the company.
Yup, I worked tech support at an ISP back when NIC drivers could be a PITA.
There was a phenomenon I called 'first blamer advantage', whoever the customer called first whether it be the NIC maker, Microsoft, their ISP would blame their problems on someone else and the customer would think whoever was blamed was at fault.
Usually we'd blame the NIC company, and then offer to send a tech out to fix the problem we blamed on them as a courtesy which made the customers accept the ridiculously long time it took to get a tech out.
It's true, but wouldn't you receive extraordinary amount of misplaced calls anyway?
I remember discussing with a website support guy who would get calls about printers not working, screen flickering and claims about some other unrelated websites that he didn't even know existed.
There is of course tweaks that can be made to a product to reduce the amount of support calls, but misplaced blame should be par for the course whatever you do.
True, but limiting their system to first-party bulbs will likely mean a higher resolution rate and avoids the dreaded "sorry, you're going to have to speak to the bulb manufacturer". There's nothing more toxic to a customer support experience than two separate companies saying the other is to blame.
Well, I think this was the point of all the complaints yesterday: people couldn't connect a 3rd party bulb to Philips' hub and assumed that the product (the hub) is terrible.
Speak with tech support for other vendors enough, and the same picture emerges. As computers and software take on a greater utility role with more users, this is likely to be expected.
Steve Jobs' early instinct to deliver a walled garden experience to consumers was correct. My guess is we'll see a widening bifurcation of the market, where consumers go ever-deeper into a walled garden, while professionals/commercial purchasers pay much higher price points for more accessible, manipulable gear. Once the complexity of some commercial gear reaches a certain threshold of support costs however, I expect that gear will head towards black box, closed designs. Maturing the software we write so it tames the complexity and makes managing it fun/ego-engaging in some manner could go a long ways towards pushing back that trend (if it emerges in the way I think it will).
I hope you are right, and I'm wrong. I suspect this is a temporary, happy circumstance that we enjoy today, due to the segment of history we inhabit, but am concerned it will be reversed due to physics, further market segmentation, and an ongoing miniaturization mania.
As semiconductor fabrication processes get smaller, die sizes larger, and operating frequencies higher, I think we will see the hardware become more opaque. Already the test equipment to hack on cutting edge workstation- and server-class processors is spendy; just a 2GHz 10GS/s oscilloscope is 5 figures USD $ even used and just-calibrated. As manufacturers head towards greater integration on the die to differentiate themselves in a furiously- and constantly-commoditizing industry, we'll likely see more binary blobs at first, then market segmentation hits those of us who want open/powerful gear with a double-whammy. We enjoy the fruits of commodified hardware components now, but I'm not sanguine that state of affairs will last indefinitely due to the aforementioned integration trends.
As everyone noticed that personalized gear enjoys outsized margins, we're seeing ever-increased pressure to further integrate and miniaturize into smaller packaging; repairability and accessibility to the hardware not invited at all to the design party. I really wish this specific trend would reverse.
I suspect that the PC as we know it will morph into a greater walled-garden device in the next several decades, and if we want open/powerful gear we will find ourselves in a tiny market segment. At best, paying very high prices for the small volumes catered to, and at worst, in a technology ghetto.
For now, I agree with you, but the long-term constraints are not promising to me further openness of the hardware.
Actually, this statement is kind of wrong - it's only the printers fault if it sabotages the cartridges. What if it doesn't? It could be the case that the cartridge was faulty, I wouldn't assume all printers sabotage cartridges (I use third-party epson ones all the time, have had the occasional faulty one).
Not disputing that some printers just refuse to work with third-party carts, but it's not the case with most printers I've used.
The vast majority of who? If you mean a vast majority of your customers calling into a support center, I'd argue that is a very small amount. I'd venture to say very few of peers in my circles call into support outside of account level tasks.
That's exactly my point, the majority of people who do contact support are just average consumers. If removing third-party bulb support means a better experience for everyone and reduces the burden of support overall (both for users having to contact support and the support load itself), I completely understand their decision.
We tech-savvy people have a better understanding of things like compatibility, the drawbacks of third-party/unofficial accessories etc. But try explaining that to someone who has no interest or experience in this, and they'll just not understand - or care.
If Philips had stuck to their decision, it would've meant that, for anyone contact support, they could handle the entirety of the problem. This avoids the boomeranging of "well it might be your bulb, go speak to the people who made it".
I don't know many people who use home automation, lighting systems like this, but of those that do - all but one is not someone I'd consider tech-savvy.
I have no strong feelings one way or the other about this decision. Honestly, if I ever used this, I'd probably stick to first party products. As I get older, I find that I just don't care or want to spend the time fiddling with compatibility issues. If I'm in the market for automated light bulbs, chances are I'll have no problem stretching my budget to first party bulbs.
If Windows crashes because of an badly coded third-party driver, do you think people will blame Windows or the driver manufacturer? Most people will not internalize the workings of the system and just blame the system as a whole, which in this case has the brand name Philips on it.
I think it's a smart move and reasonable compromise, similar to Microsofts WHQL program.
Badly coded driver is a special case, because it often crashes the system in a way seemingly unrelated to the installation itself (or software it came with), showing you a nasty blue screen (which is known generally as "the Windows problem"). I know most people get confused about cases like these (and had more than enough experience with fixing them for such people).
But I used a different analogy on purpose. You bought a Hue Bridge - presumably, with at least one Hue bulb (do they even sell Bridges separately?). So you know it works. Then you buy a noname cheap bulb, plug it in, and it - the cheap bulb - doesn't work. The Bridge still works, the Hue bulb also works, it's just the new, different one that doesn't. I find it hard to believe there are many people who can't connect the dots.
>I find it hard to believe there are many people who can't connect the dots.
It doesn't surprise me at all. The key to remember is that people are not rational creatures. They work off of emotions and then apply logic to try to rationalize their emotions.
The most popular alternative bulb is the GE Link bulb. Roughly the same price as the hue lux bulbs but brighter, and available in more stores (in my experience.)
Fuck tell me about it, I had some servers flaking out on 2K3, it took months of windbg to find out it was the SCSI controller driver borking the whole thing.
It took especially long since I had rewritten most of System.IO to support 32K paths in .NET so I assumed that I had subtly fucked something up, it was only when the SQL Server started crashing that I even considered drivers.
> It's like complaining to your PC manufacturer that a program you downloaded doesn't work.
This happens far, far more often than you would think. That line from Men in Black -- "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky animals." -- rings more true every time I work with a client who handles front-line tech support.
I do have to wonder how much of a difference it would make right now, though. Hue is presumably still in the early adopter stage (especially if we're talking about people who are adding non-Hue Zigbee devices to the setup), where you'd hope this kind of confusion would be less common.
Edit: this is one of the primary reasons Apple exercises so much control over third party integration on iOS. They get the blame for everything.
My SO worked way too long answering customer phone calls; I had a healthy fit of horror stories every week. But what I learned from them is that it's all selection bias - savvy, smart customers generally don't call. They solve things themselves, they find solutions themselves, they trust the established procedures (e.g. of returning the merchandise), but above all, they don't call with stupid requests or to bitch about how bad the company is. They only call if you fucked up big.
What remains is a mix of "dumb, panicky animals" and people for whom calling is the best option (they may be in a hurry; or for many older people, phone call is the method they're used to and one they trust). It's something you have to deal with, it's for them that you have support in the first place. But for a company like Philips, I can't imagine those support calls make any difference brand-wise. Most companies I know could drop their private-customer help lines altogether, having them respond with busy tone all the time, and nobody would likely notice.
You are a typical consumer. You buy a HUE system because it has the best reviews. Then you realize you need lightbulbs as well. You go on amazon, look at your options. You can get the Phillips ones, but they're too expensive, so you buy the other ones.
You pair the bulbs. It's complicated, but you just follow a guide on the internet word-for-word to get through it.
A few months later, your system starts acting wonky. Regardless of what's actually causing the problem, the reality is that you now have to go to the trouble of figuring out what is wrong with your system and then fixing it.
Your experience with the Phillips Hue has been soured.
So, given that it seems that neither you nor I have used these things, lemmy float you a hypothetical:
> A few months later, your system starts acting wonky.
What if "your system starts acting wonky" means "Only the non-Phillips bulbs stop behaving correctly."?
Growing up, I knew of many, many people who would only stick with brand-name things because of quality or compatibility concerns. I would expect that many affected users would be able to recognize that their non-Phillips bulbs were acting up and their Phillips bulbs were not.
> 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.
Have you met "most people"? They would blame PC manufacturer indeed.
Just remember Vista and how suddenly all kinds of software stopped working. Surprise: most of the time, this software used undocumented features and sometimes even bugs present in previous Windows systems.
I did. I spent a lot of time fixing "computer stuff" for those people.
I remember Vista (ironically, I'm probably the only person I know who didn't have a problem with it and, besides the slow file copying, geneally liked it) - but there, in a way, some blame towards MS was justified. They were releasing a next iteration of their operating system to the already mature software market that's built on interoperability. Microsoft itself had a strong tradition of caring about backward compatibility. With Vista, they failed to provide an OS compatibile with existing application ecosystem, even if it's third party developers who didn't follow the specs.
Here, on the other hand, the "bulb" ecosystem is only starting, and Hue is the reference platform.
It's about time Windows actually stops dragging the concrete boots around (riddiculous backwards compatibility) - it's infuriating how broken stuff in Windows is, and some of the brokeness has been around for YEARS.
Just do an XP fork for VM to run all the legacy stuff on and start fixing stuff already, damn!
MSFT would have to provide that. I tried to reinstall XP on one of my Parallels VMs the other month and it failed because the license couldn't be validated. Support has ended, so the Microsoft licensing service no longer allows new installs, even for developers.
> Just do an XP fork for VM to run all the legacy stuff on and start fixing stuff already, damn!
Oh yeah. I can just see "most people" powering up VMs to run their outdated broken software that they depend on.
Why I'm sarcastic? Because the situation is completely broken, there's no right solution. All that's left is to ridicule all sides of the argument, because everyone who thinks that there is a way to make it right is wrong.
The point is that the xp vm would be transparent. Microsoft has done various compatibility layers before - see windows on windows and windows on windows 64.
The core question is how much isolation optimizes future development while maintaining the ability to run older applications.
People install all kinds of crap on their computer, forget about it, and later on don't make the connection that the outdated kernel extension they installed is crashing their machine.
(I speak from experience. I was able to track a surprising number of bug reports in my apps to internet filters, kernel extensions, etc. It's so common that it's the one of the first questions I ask customers when they report a bug. And it's why sandobexed apps are so successful -- all of the sudden you can install apps without worrying that they'll break your computer)
>Would they? Wouldn't they blame their bulb first?
Considering how many people get mad at individuals who are named Isis, as if they have any relation to the IS, I wouldn't doubt some of them blaming Philips.
> 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 gotta disagree. I tend to find "normal" people will blame the manufacturer or microsoft whenever anything goes wrong regardless of the actual cause.
From my observation, people are generally smart enough that if they bought expensive product A that works and is of a well-known brand, and then later they bought some unknown noname-brand cheap product B which doesn't wok with A, they'll blame the product B, not product A.
I'm asserting that avoiding support calls by the minority who can't reason about technology at all is not worth the tarnishing of the brand Philips did to itself when trying to get rid of those calls.
Tech support calls perhaps, but there's more that can damage a brand's reputation than that. I'm not for blocking third party hardware as they originally did, but I understand their position as a company as well.
However since I can't back up my original claim I'll leave it at that.
I'm not sure what the interface looks like, but if it's a GUI with icons representing each bulb, and users see it every day or at least any time they want to troubleshoot, they could put a little yellow warning mini-icon inside each non-hue and non-friend bulb icon. It could have a tooltip or something with the "learn more" that reminds the user.
they'd still get mad at Philips when a third-party bulb breaks
I don't disagree with you -- a subset of customers are going to be angry regardless of warnings, they only go so far. But the issue at hand is how best to deal with the problem they have publicly stated was the reason for this decision: Some subset of third-party bulbs do not work ideally in their ecosystem. Option #1 was to warn customers of this problem and let them decide. There are several other options that were available to them. The farthest down that list, and worst option they had was to disable the bulbs. I would expect that last option to be used only for bulbs that caused fires or other safety issues. That wasn't the case (or I would have expected them to have stated that directly since it would have been something a lot of people would have understood). I don't think Philips realized how major of a feature this is, particularly to early adopters.
The proposed text sends the wrong message at the wrong time. It's in the way when someone just wants to turn on a light but the bulb was bad. Instead, why not offer a helpful and fair priced mechanism for selling bulbs when one needs replacement? If the company gets a cut of the sale, it doesn't even matter very much what brand is chosen.
If the software remembered that there was an off-brand bulb in the socket that went out, it could do a nicely worded "I told you so" to remind the consumer. The hub (I'm assuming this system has a hub or something) could keep track of the # of hours the bulbs have been in use, and report that the off-brand bulb only lasted 1/2x as long. Of course, if the off-brand bulbs were lasting 2x longer, then perhaps the hub should just keep it's mouth shut... :)
They could just add a settings option "Enable display of 3rd party lights." Non tech minority is thus protected inside the walled garden from the big bad world out there by default while tech savvy users can still use their technology to full extent.
We really need to stop compromising our tech just because some loud minority refuses to understand how things work.
They could make the dialog look like it will explode a mine. I'm not sure if the software can know when something isn't working but if it does and the last know bulb was a third-party bulb it could then remind you about it.
