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.
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.
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.
However since I can't back up my original claim I'll leave it at that.
I think it's a smart move and reasonable compromise, similar to Microsofts WHQL program.
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.
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.
lol, bro ... have you worked with humans like, ever?
Usually $20 for the Philips vs $15 for the GE Link at 800 vs 750 Lumen :)
I only have the colored Hue lights and the white GE Link so far. I might buy a Lux just to see how it works.
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.
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 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.
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 core question is how much isolation optimizes future development while maintaining the ability to run older applications.
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.
> 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.
If I had a dime for every time I heard someone say "This _____ing computer!" every time a program crashed...
"If Bill Gates had a nickel for every time Windows crashed... wait a second, he does!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Selection bias. The people coming to the genius bar obviously think there's something wrong with the computer.
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.
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).
Factually I think we should forbid selling devices we are forbidden to touch and avoid the whole issue.
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.
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.
Yes.
>Wouldn't they blame their bulb first?
No.
>It's like complaining to your PC manufacturer that a program you downloaded doesn't work.
Yes, and people do that all the time.
>Most people would blame the program and look for another one.
Bro, do you even tech support?
(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)
I gotta disagree. I tend to find "normal" people will blame the manufacturer or microsoft whenever anything goes wrong regardless of the actual cause.
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.
We really need to stop compromising our tech just because some loud minority refuses to understand how things work.