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Comment by imroot | Hacker News Reader

The biggest issue that I have with google is product sustainability -- if something doesn't seem to have "Hockey stick" levels of growth and use, google kills it.

Do I want to spend $500 on yet another google branded brick?

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Does Google kill hardware often? What's the previous Google brick you can remember?

> Does Google kill hardware often?

Its killed several hardware projects (Nexus Q comes to mind immediately, though that only got into anyone's hands as a prerelease version at I/O 2012), but I don't know that any of those have involved bricking devices already sold (though cutting off software support and associated services may have reduced the potential lifespan for some, but that happens for old models from most makers even if the project isn't killed; Nexus Q, for instance, had support dropped in Google Play Music and Google Movies & TV in May and June of 2013.)

If we look at Alphabet and not just Google, there's the Revolv hub that was bricked. However they assured us that it's not the end... just the beginning of a new wonderful chapter in the journey of home automation, and sorry that the hardware we sold you doesn't work any more

http://revolv.com/

That's a product that was made by a failed company that Google acquihired people from. And Google supported it well past when that company would have if they had died on their own.

Did people that bought it know that their "lifetime subscriptions" would end in less than 2 years, and that they'd only get 1 month's notice before their houses stopped working? You'd think that a company like Google would have the resources to keep a single VM running to support them, or do what other companies have done and release a firmware update that allows limited offline capabilities.

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