The Dropcam Team
medium.com
medium.com
I also worked at Nest (on the thermostat product) and couldn't echo your comments more strongly.
Tony Fadell is a terrible manager. There are so many public data points at this point: the perma 6 day work weeks, the "f* being Googly" comment at the all hands, refusing to allow Nest employees to have the Google massage benefits because "they don't deserve it", and now, throwing a great team under the bus to hide his inability to manage. I have another twenty that I can't share because of confidentiality and I'm sure you do as well.
The fact that Alphabet/Google hasn't replaced him is a horribly disappointing statement about what they think is most important: profit, not employees, not culture. Or maybe not even profit after your comments. :(
Please do write the other story about your acquisition when you can - a lot of people here could learn a lot from it as a cautionary tale.
I can't fathom having to do that at a salaried job and staying for more than two weeks. Unless they were paying me an obscene amount of money, but even then, I'd probably be on the look out for something better.
I'd rather have a well paying dev job with reasonable hours, and work on games in my own time.
Also, the pipeline and recruiting is set up for it. Places like Full Sail are set up right next door to major studios - you get your training, then you walk into the meat grinder.
But yeah, gamasutra does a survey each year and the career time in gamedev is usually around ~3 years.
Wikipedia has him as leading Google Glass. I guess that is all you need to know about his qualities then.
Besides, Arlo's freemium so I don't really get your argument (you get 7 days of recording free, up to 5 cameras; $$ if you want more of either).
I like the idea of Dropcam, but $200/camera PLUS a monthly fee I can't swallow. It's an expensive razor with expensive blades.
But, I'm just some random schmo and not a millionaire who sold his company to Google, so feel free to disagree!
My guess is Arlo is burning investor money for projected growth, which is a perfectly valid trade-off (for a while.)
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you, it was an "expensive-razor-with-expensive-blades" situation, but over time we estimated the razor would get cheaper and the blades (for the same price) would cook your meals and wash the dishes.
For the record, I'm far from a millionaire entrepreneur. I'm just lucky enough to have worked at a great company that had a solid product and got sold for a good amount of money. Can't complain about the outcome, but you won't see me buying a mansion in LA any time soon ;)
I recognize that I've bought a product that might stop working at Dropcam/Nest/Google's whim, but Google, at least, I trust to give reasonable notice for sunsetting.
I used the dropcam to replace a homebrewed IP cam setup + dyndns + yadda yadda + recording to my synology. It turns out that free wasn't very free -- it took too much of my time on an ongoing basis. Having the dropcam just work was worth the price (and the risk of it becoming a paperweight after three or four years -- which it hasn't yet!)
To me it feels like being nickel & dimed and honestly I'm sick of everything being a subscription (I've written on this elsewhere). At least with Spotify I still own my computer and headphones if I decide to cancel -- Drop/Nestcams are essentially $200 bricks if the internet goes down or you decide not to pay. My Nest thermostat still works without an internet connection.
Cell phones are a good example, you can either pay $0 up front and a larger subscription fee in a contract, or buy the phone up front and pay a smaller, no-contract subscription. Dropcams are the worst of both worlds.
(side note: I saw no mention of subscriptions on any of Nestcam's top level pages on their site.)
Obviously plenty of others think it's a fine deal, so I'm just the dissenting minority opinion :)
I know that I'm personally very irrational when deciding prices: I find paying for HBO Now ($15 a month) an outrage, but will go and spend $20 on a cinema ticket without batting an eyelid. Heck, an Uber ride from the cinema because I'm too lazy is ~$10. Throw in a soda, and every trip to the cinema is about $40. I'm getting around 10 to 15 hours of entertainment out of the HBO subscription, which at ~$1 an hour is a much better deal than going to the movies, but no amount of rationalizing it will make it feel good.
There's clearly enough people that consider the $10 a month price "good enough" to be comfortable with it.
Yeah, well, they're probably not doing so hot on the "profit" part, either since while they're all busy having their internal squabbles, they're not innovating AFAICT. No more Nest products for me, because they don't seem to do any better than less expensive options (now that competitors have caught up, which was not a monumental task). The thermostat and camera that I've got are pretty much standalone devices (the camera and thermostat might talk to each other now, I think). From my minimal research, those two devices do not appear that will be a part of a "home automation system" other than talking (poorly) to each other. No HomeKit integration, of course, now that Google has purchased them. Yeah, there's Brillo, but to (put it kindly) Google past performance doesn't have me holding my breath. I expect a poorly-documented, buggy first release and after a few years it'll be usable.
Probably completely unrelated since Nest doesn't even support Google's Brillo/Weave. They're going forward with their own "Nest Weave" which despite the name is a completely separate platform/ecosystem from Google's stuff.
Wouldn't be surprised if Homekit support is actually on the cards but it's stuck in their super slow release cycle.
I swear, I don't know what gets into companies sometimes. They do that, they've all but assured that I'll never buy another Nest anything. Brillo? I wouldn't be happy about it (as primarily an Apple user), but I'd understand. And who knows, I'm open to options. But your own special snowflake API? Yeah, screw that, I've been down that road too many times.
The thermostat was a nice product, and that's part of what's so interesting about the backstory of all of this.
I'm sorry you had to go through the pain as well. I will try to write more at some point, and I only hope it helps somehow, even if just for future entrepreneurs.
To be fair to Tony Fadell, as I understand it, he made the comments to his team and not the public, so he was probably speaking more from the hip than he would have if he was talking to a reporter.
In this case he was trying to assure his team that they shouldn't be worried about the departures, and one way to do so would be to try and spin it as a positive. On the other hand, wow, you just said this about people who you are trying to integrate into your team.
Anyone whose managed people knows how hard it is to keep your employee's happy, especially when things aren't going well. You are constantly fighting battles and just when you feel like you've reached your breaking point you get another burden put on your shoulders.
TL/DR Stress is an awful thing and it makes people react in ways that they normally wouldn't.
If they really weren't any good, it should have been obvious to the rest of the team already.
This type of dialogue does not inspire trust in anyone. How can you trust someone who speaks ill of people behind their backs ? How do you know they won't do the same to you when your back is turned ?
Besides there is something profoundly wrong about taking stabs at someone who cannot defend themself. I am not sure I can fully get behind someone like that.
Character is doing the right thing when nobody's looking. There are too many people who think that the only thing that's right is to get by, and the only thing that's wrong is to get caught. - J. C. Watts
Character is what you are in the dark. - D.L. Moody
I'm starting to the think their needs to be a tech CEO version of these quotes. I think he needs to be fair to other people before someone is fair to him. Putting a positive spin on something by disparaging others is a sign of low character and poor leadership.
Whenever a manager or executive tells the team that they didn't want the people who left anyway, it makes me think three things:
1. They shouldn't have continued to employ people who they didn't value in the first place -- if you have identified someone who isn't working out, it should be dealt with (fairly and humanely) rather than waiting for attrition to do your job for you.
2. This person probably says this about everyone who falls out of their favor.
3. For all I know this is what they'll be saying about me in a month, so I may as well make other plans and be somewhere that values employees appropriately.
It's really damaging to team morale to make these kinds of blanket statements, and I don't respect or trust people who refuse to hold themselves to a higher standard than that.
It is not obvious that "Reed Albergotti’s recent article." is a link. No anchor tag styling css to know otherwise. On clicking the hidden link I see the following
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It will nice, if we can fix both problems, so your medium article reaches more target audience.
[0] https://medium.com/designing-medium/crafting-link-underlines...
Personally, I'm just not seeing it. The idea of a centralized or master system is old fashioned. People will just buy automation as they need it. So I'll have an app on my phone for my Ring doorbell, another for my garage door, another for my security system, another for my lighting, etc. Google is betting that people won't want this and want an Apple-like experience of just having one vendor perform all their tasks, but people without SV salaries aren't going to casually drop Nest-like prices (total cost of the system with multiple smoke detectors is in the four digits) all at once and they might resent a high level of vendor lock-in. They'll just pick up random automation pieces at home depot for $99 each now and again and just install a new app as needed. Its not a terrible inconvenience and so what if my doorbell can't talk to my thermostat.
Central management is key. Though I suspect most people would be better off using a central device many of them already have at home (a PC) than buying a custom piece of hardware to be the center of their home network.
Basing everything around your phone isn't a good solution, because it leads to having a half dozen accounts with a half dozen apps that you need to set up on a half dozen devices if you have a family...
But this is all a debate independent of Google's troubles. Between Android@Home and OnHub and Nest, Google's been trying to nail down IoT since before IoT was an expression people used. No sign they're going to get the hang of it any time soon.
I mostly agree with your overall point though. I'm just not sure what an automated home would really do that I should care about.
Your doorbell and thermostat have little to do with each other, but having your camera or your smoke detector as mention sensors for your thermostat is pretty useful. The smoke detectors especially, since they tend to be in the bedrooms, which is the place where you'll stay 8 hours a day without walking in front of your thermostat so that it knows you are home.
It doesn't work, but he's obsessed with velocity, so he keeps doing it.