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Comment by rubidium | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

I disagree. Almost every shitty (customer-wise) decision I've seen a company doing was made by Marketing / Sales people. It's them who figure out that they can get more money by doing something repulsive.

This here seems to me like someone was calculating how much more they can earn by pushing manufacturers down the "Friends of Hue" line, but underestimated just how many people use non-FoH bulbs (or just how much nerds care about interoperability). Probably not someone from marketing, definitely not someone from engineering.

> 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.

Why would they care? They're not testing compatibility with Chinese knockoffs anyway, that's why they use ZigBee, and that's why they have a "Friends of Hue" program.

> 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.

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".

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.

I don't think you've invalidated his point at all. It's not about why this happened, it's that it happened at all. Apathetic, poor decision making can be just as bad as greedy, poor decision making. Sometimes people need a reminder that corporations are not your friends and investing too much trust is a risky choice.

My goal wasn't to invalidate. It was to say that the grandparent must not trust any large, publicly traded company. Which is exactly your final sentence.

However, I would say that a company (big or small) that actually changes their strategic marketing decision based on a user complaints _is_ rare. And this shows that Phillips has some good mechanisms in place to respond. To me, they come out a bit ahead at the end of this.

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