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Comment by balls187 | Hacker News Reader

Don't blame the market.

Blame the engineers who know the risks of such foolishness that lack the courage and conviction to stand up to decision makers.

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I used to work for match.com and we had a readout in the office that streamed customer feedback. 90% of it was people who had paid subscriptions complaining about intrusive advertising on the site or in the app while logged in.

I raised this at a meeting and was told that they weren‘t going to change it because it made too much money.

I’m sure engineers raised issues about this as well and were shut down by the business people who are more than happy to risk customer satisfaction and security if it means more revenue.

Respectfully, raising an issue isn't the same as taking a stand.

At the very least, many products have unpopular features that are easier than one might expect to disable. And that’s quite often down to a developer who disagrees creating or leaving a covert channel lying around to circumvent the feature. Their boss didn’t tell them to put it in, and they didn’t tell anyone about it so that it was insubordination if they didn’t agree to take it out. Just a little something we accidentally left in for debugging or PoC purposes. Whupsie!

Finding another job and marking them as unethical on glassdoor would be more like taking a stand. Raising awareness of management is just the polite first step.

one of the reasons wallstreet invented outsourcing of uppity techs.

Both. I also blame the guy willing to spend $2,000 for a glorified blanket that also needs a monthly subscription to work properly.

The real gem of this post is the aquarium temperature regulator solution. I'm tempted to implement it myself to deal with hot summers.

The market deserves some blame here.

My partner has difficulty sleep unless it is the perfect environment (black out curtains, noise cancellation, sound bath, temperature), and is more prone to the effects of a single bad nights sleep. For people like her, $20/mo + $2000 fee is a small price to pay for a solution to a very difficult problem.

I would of course, attempt to veto unnecessary IoT devices and subscriptions for usage, but this would be a fight I would likely not win.

They're not complaining about the price. They're complaining about the high price for a bed where those high priced features stop working if your internet goes down, or there is a server outage, or you stop paying a monthly fee, or the original company goes bankrupt.

How in the world does this necessitate a subscription? All of these things can work without centralization, setup once, and contained entirely within the home.

> How in the world does this necessitate a subscription?

I can only speculate.

But, there is demand to improve sleep quality. The provider wants to charge a monthly fee for that.

The market simply puts buys and sellers together. People making business decisions will stick with Econ 101--charge what the market will bare, and why shouldn't they?

>charge what they market will bare

They want you to sleep without any clothing?

She won't get any sleep if the wifi is down.

Or if the power is out.

I think there is some naming convention gap here. I would call it Sleep Equipment as we have exercise equipments. Then folks will find pricing more reasonable. There is further opportunity to differentiate market with Sleep, Sleep Pro and Sleep Enterprise products.

The pro and enterprise version would allow local server setup for critical sleep equipment functioning and can manage all beds in a household or hotel etc . It can update the version of software or data models when its online and new features are available on cloud server.

I surmise at 300 dollar/month for pro version could be really attractive proposition. Of course local server setup and maintenance can be charged separately.

If you don’t want IOT for the bed warmer/chiller then there’s this:

https://sleep.me/product/cube-sleep-system

It works rather well, I’m tempted to reverse-engineer the remote control protocol for home automation purposes.

How easy is it to know what works when the network is down before purchasing? Do you expect everyone to take down their wifi after purchase to test and return if it doesn't work?

Maybe there should be a mandatory information sheet such as listing all functionality that stops working without a network connection.

Consumer protection regulation with mandatory labeling would be a good answer but, at least in the US, we're not going to have anything like that anytime soon (if ever).

I don't have the enthusiasm to start a competing company. It sounds like the barrier to entry to the market is fairly low, the tech isn't unproven, and there appears to be a ton of margin.

I assume Eight Sleep has a patent moat.

I have a mortgage so I will follow all lawful orders. I'll blow the whistle if illegal activities are forced upon me, but if there's an ethical issue bothering you, I'd suggest you write to your MP or if you believe they are incompetent or hostile, to run against them in the next election and change the law yourself.

> Blame the engineers

I actually commend them for making money off the morons who dreamed this up. They've hopefully put it to better use.

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