It's good they're providing refunds, but the decision to shut down whatever service the glasses relied on in an excellent way to demonstrate "When you buy a product from us, you can't trust that it's going for any given period of time, and we'll just brick it when we get bored of it".
Google of course is famous for doing this with many of its products, but in the long run this type of behavior can make it harder for startups to introduce new products/services. Some customers will ask the question "So what happens when you get acqui-hired in a year and your parent company decides to shut down your service either immediately, or a year after they tell customers that everything will continue unchanged?"
Of course the bigger lesson here is don't buy products which rely on a third-party service to function.
People didn't buy the product from Google. They bought it from North -- which was later acquired by Google for less than they had raised as they were apparently running out of money [1]. If North had not been acquired and had simply gone out of business, the service also would have been shut down (and likely without a refund).
"for less than they had raised" - that's actually not true and sloppy journalism from the journalists that wrote it.
If you look at North's funding - the difference between the suspected purchase price of $180M and what they raised ($200M) is a $24M loan they received from the government of Canada [1], which was called back shortly after (because of layoffs) [2].
The remaining $4M difference is probably interest on a standard debt financing loan of $40M they received [3] and some rounding error in the $180M suspected purchase price.
It seems Google bought them for the exact amount raised, in both debt and funding.
Sorry for the quibble, but it's only a win in Vegas because the expected value in Vegas is negative due to the house edge. The expected value of human effort is typically positive, so a push is not a win in the development of companies.
The expected value in tech startup investment is also negative, I'd suggest. Just like Vegas, all the rational players are really just gambling on the 100x jackpots, and all the "dreamers" who believe and double/triple down on their ideas that never make a profit - fund the whole game.
> The expected value in tech startup investment is also negative, I'd suggest. Just like Vegas, all the rational players are really just gambling on the 100x jackpots
Expected value is precisely the quantity that says that the value of a 3% chance of 100x returns is a 3x return. Also, how can you say that the expected value of investment is negative, but that the rational players are gambling at all? Perhaps you mean that the 3% chance of 100x (or whatever) is irrational for the founders, which may be true, but that isn't really what your words say.
Sure, but "3% chance of 100x returns" is firmly in "dreamer" territory. Best guess I can find is that it's at least an order of magnitude smaller than that:
A 0.3% chance of a 100x return is a 70% loss. (And over 10 years, a 3x "return" is pretty much just breaking even anyway)
The "rational players" in this game are the VCs who're raking 2%/year from the investors in their funds (whether they succeed or not), and also skimming their 20% liquidity event bonus - so they benefit from the winning funds without ever having any personal financial risk in all the losing funds.
In my opinion, pretty much every other tech startup investor could be categorised as one or more of 1) Dreamers (who genuinely believe _this_ one is going be "their unicorn!!!"), 2) Lottery players (throwing away a hopefully insignificant enough amount of money to them, in return for the entertainment of maybe winning big one day) 3) Horse race gamblers (someone who believes they're better informed than 99% of the other investors in their chosen horse/jockey/startup/founder) 4) early stage employees who wittingly or unwittingly accepted vesting options as part of their renumeration (these are arguably somewhere on the spectrum between #1 and #2) or possibly 5) insider traders (pretty much a legally actionable case of #3).
(And I say this with the hindsight of having been the first four of those - some of them several times over...)
From what I've been told they didn't. Only the founders managed to get anything out of the sales, plus took pretty lavish salaries while the company was operating (a lot of it from government subsidies).
Given that analogy, I'm curious how a VC would view this kind of exit. Is breaking "even" seen as some kind of success given the higher failure rate for venture backed companies?
A friend of mine was CTO as a startup that raised like $100 million. They knew it was gonna flop after a while, and wanted to wind the company down and return 50% of the VC’s money. The VC told them to take extreme risk and/or drive the company into the ground before returning the cash. A 100% loss was expected, but a 50% loss was somehow an embarrassment.
Pretty sure PG has talked about this and said something to the effect that all of their money is made on the extreme outliers rather than the ordinary failures or modest successes. Knowing that, it kinda makes sense that they'd rather see the startup push and try to go big rather than just going home.
Well, it depends on the numbers involved. If they estimated a 5% chance of getting $2 billion, then that would be a 2x expected return on a $50 million cost, which is entirely rational for investors with huge pockets. But if they estimated a 1% chance of getting $2 billion, then that's a 0.4x expected return (an expected loss of $30 million), which is irrational, unless the "embarrassment" is a significant factor for the VCs, and that would be interesting.
Yes, that's a fair point--the numbers for the potential upside and downside matter a lot here. I was only trying to make the case that in some cases, the downside risk may not hold a candle to the potential upside.
I also think that they want to see founders who are willing to charge up those hills rather than to shirk away from challenges that seem to be too big for them. Sort of like burning your ships behind you in terms of morale--if it's go big or go home and you can't go home, there's only one choice left.
Supposedly for a VC it is a bit better to liquidate at break even than to limp along with an uncertain future, because VCs no longer have to spend time going to board meetings.
Stories like this are why I will never buy a product like Stadia from Google. There is zero guarantee the product and games purchased on the platform will be usable next month (exaggerating a bit) or next year.
This extends to all things Google. When building a new product, I push hard to use any alternative to Google because the future of their products is so uncertain. Sure, there are a few Google products that can be reasonably relied upon, but that list is small.
Ever since Google told me to buzz off when I contacted them about the bootloop of death that bricked my Nexus 6P immediately after an automatic software update, I haven't bought a single hardware product marketed by them or supported by them. I won't even let myself use Google Fi. They earned my distrust.
I think one big thing that differs between the Nexus line and the Pixel line of phones is who was actually supporting the phone after its sale. The Nexus phones were these shared branding between Google and the makers (LG, HTC, whoever). So it led to some pointing at the other person when there were problems.
With the Pixel line, Google fully owns support of the devices, which makes it a bit easier for Google to deal with customer support issues like this.
Ah yes the famed google customer support. Spent five days trying to get a g-suite dashboard error fixed immediately after provisioning. Eventually I switched to O365 with no regrets. And then there was the bricked chromecast from hell which they wouldn’t even acknowledge. Switched to Apple TV with no regrets.
Add the usual quality control (how many years did my android phone alarm not go off or my SD card get trashed with photos on). Nope!
I don’t accept this line of reasoning but appreciate you sticking up for your employer.
I’ve noticed this tactic more and more. Price a product as if it’s yours, but then disown it when inconvenient.
I can’t imagine Apple saying something like “that’s a Samsung issue, take it up with them” because of a component.
As a customer, I don’t want to have a decoder ring for how to get support for my product. If it says google and is sold by google then google should fix it. Maybe they sub it out to HTC or Huawei or whatever, but don’t make me know about it.
If google makes bad supply chain decisions then own up to it. Not doing so just makes Google seem incompetent at management as I don’t care or have any value in them directly for manufacturing.
> As a customer, I don’t want to have a decoder ring for how to get support for my product.
As an Australian this is so weird to hear. I have a business relationship with the person I gave money to, not some third party factory or manufacturer that I never met. The law requires the merchant to take the return and make it right, after that it's their problem. Most likely they have a better idea about the next step than I would as a random customer.
It's not a US thing, it's mainly a Google thing. They appear to have decided that they can reduce costs by saying "it's not our problem" in response to customer complaints about defective products. They do this for defects that may not even be rooted in the hardware itself.
My general impression is that most companies are quick to take responsibility for consumer products sold in the US, unless product failure results in liability for a major safety risk (think McDonald's coffee scalds or Ford Explorer rollover accidents).
If the engine computer fails in a BMW due to a widespread defect, the BMW dealer doesn't send the customer to Bosch on a wild goose chase. If a Macbook Pro SSD fails due to a widespread defect, Apple doesn't tell the customer to call Samsung. They either take ownership of the problem and make the customer happy (with the expectation that a brand-loyal customer's next purchase will pay the cost of solving the current problem), or they make an effort to offer some kind of solution at the customer's cost.
I think I'm talking about something a little different, which is my mistake. The parent was discussing a manufacturer disowning components within items, as you noted.
I'm taking it a step further and saying we don't even talk to the manufacturer, just the store - it doesn't matter what Apple thinks (unless you bought it directly from them). There's a legal concept of whether or not the item is fit for purpose or defective (generally, if you knew X would happen before you bought it, would you still have bought it?) which shuts down excuses.
That's funny, when I bought my Nexus 4 I don't remember the front of the box saying, "Nexus 4: A shared branding between Google and LG." It said "Nexus 4" and had Google's logo displayed somewhere on there. I bought it from store.google.com, my credit card was charged by Google. It said "Google" on the box, so if I had an issue with it I would have expected Google to fix it. Anything less and they'd have been in the wrong.
I get what you're saying, I understand it. But from the consumer's point of view it just doesn't matter. The nature of the business relationship between Google and whomever should not be their concern. It rings of the same cop-out Amazon likes to make, that I'm not dealing with them, I'm dealing with a some third part merchant even though I visited Amazon.com, I paid Amazon, and the item is shipped to me by Amazon. They want to you deal with their suppliers.
My Pixel broke suddenly after an update. Android debugger console clearly showing a spew of ALSA errors. Hundreds of other people having the issue on forums - been 3 years and no patch has resolved it. I hang onto the phone as a cautionary tale not to purchase anything from google... Have never been able to get a customer rep on the line who can say anything other than "sorry, cant help". No refunds, no RMA, nothing. So... What customer support are you referring to?
If it was an open platform, I'd fix the issues myself. If it was a closed platform, I'd get it replaced. Google fails at being non-Apple and also fails at being Apple.
This also happened with many people's Nexus Players, a Roku/Firestick competitor, myself included. It's co-developed by both Google and Asus. Of course after the update bricked them Google tried to blame Asus and put it on their shoulders to provide a fix and Asus seemed to do the same. Needless to say, I won't buy Google products anymore.
dear googler. fyi -this is what that thinking and lack of integrity and support does:
you have gcp. working for vars over the years, per year i sell over $10mil of solutions that run or dr to cloud. i have not once put gcp as an option in front of a customer - all azure or aws. google has, and will, lose millions in gcp revenue. because of me. and this is true for most vars.
now, as far as others in my office -8 people like me. only one puts gcp in proposals. he's new.
this is very common. we don't trust or respect your offerings -too flaky, not going to risk our customer relationship when you drop the ball and we get the hit for proposing a bad solution. and yours are all bad solutions. not because of function -because it's risky for a business to be involved with you in any way, or count on you for anything.
you probably lose 50-80mil annually from my office alone. and it's not just lost cash. it goes to your direct competitors.
and i don't know a single person who wants you to fix your practices and act like a real company. only 2 real cloud players drives up prices, and we get more on our spiffs.
and last i checked, aws and azure have been, are, and will always be kicking your ass. because even if you fix your business practices now, you'll have to wait 30 years before all the sales staff and company decision makers retire. and that is eternity in tech time.
That's a poor (and partially false) defense for Google's handling of the Bootloop of Death, for the following reasons:
I bought Google's flagship handset online from the Google Store. It was branded as the "Google Nexus 6P", it was shipped to me by Google, and it bricked itself while booting after a Google-supplied Android update. Google provided and managed the warranty. I had one warranty claim with them prior to my phone bricking itself, handled entirely by Google; Huawei was not involved in that claim at all.
My relationship as a consumer of a Google product is with Google, not with its contract manufacturer.
The Bootloop of Death affected multiple SKUs across different Nexus models. The 5X was manufactured by LG for Google, and the 6P was manufactured by Huawei for Google. The Bootloop of Death was present on both models.
If Google has a quarrel with Huawei, LG, or another contract manufacturer over the cost of managing a defect, that's their prerogative. However, I am not party to that quarrel. I am just a customer who bought Google's flagship handset.
Google suggested that I contact the nearest Huawei service center...in mainland China. The company took an arrogant "who, me?" attitude toward its flagship handset, and tried to weasel its way out of dealing with valid customer complaints, rather than taking some semblance of responsibility for an obvious problem.
> The Nexus phones were these shared branding between Google and the makers (LG, HTC, whoever)
This is not true. The Nexus 6P was marketed by Google, not in a shared manner. You're thinking of the Nexus 6, a Motorola-made device that preceded the 6P and was offered in some markets without Google branding.
> With the Pixel line, Google fully owns support of the devices, which makes it a bit easier for Google to deal with customer support issues like this.
Google fully owned support for the Nexus 6P until the bootloop issue came around, at which point Google changed its policies. Also, Pixel devices have been manufactured by competing handset manufacturers for Google (Pixel 2 phones were manufactured by HTC and LG).
The result of my experience is that I will never, so long as I live, ever buy another Google hardware product. Not a single one. I will not buy a Nest Thermostat. I will not buy a Chromecast. If my best friend has a lapse in judgment and makes the mistake of buying a Pixelbook, I will wait for him to leave it on the couch, unintentionally sit on it, and buy him a 16" Macbook Pro as a replacement -- apologizing profusely all the while, unlike Google support which was ostensibly trained not to use the phrase, "I'm sorry." Every time someone tries to defend Google for its handling of the Nexus Bootloop of Death fiasco, I add twenty years to the length of time that the trustees of my estate will prohibit my assets from being used to buy Google hardware products after I am dead and gone.
Modern poetry, as someone who got a Nexus 5X that boot-looped after 13 months (just enough so my carrier would say "asks the manufacturer") I wholeheartedly agree with your take. It was a pathetic demonstration of the subpar capabilities of Google to deal with actual paying customer and it makes me angry to this day.
> If my best friend has a lapse in judgment and makes the mistake of buying a Pixelbook, I will wait for him to leave it on the couch, unintentionally sit on it, and buy him a 16" Macbook Pro as a replacement -- apologizing profusely all the while
Ahh yes, the wonderful Google support team. Spend any time looking at /r/GooglePixel, or doing searches on twitter, and you'll realise that isn't an improvement at all.
When the Pixel works, it works great. If you ever have a problem though, good luck. You're in for a nightmare.
I'm really disappointed with my pixel phone. The camera is partially stuffed up (seems to be a misaligned lens causing the image to be blurry) The battery life is really poor, and the usb port is loose.
These are all things I would be fine replacing myself but it seems that everyone who has tried this ends up cracking the display since the phone is glued together. Google also does not sell replacement cameras so you have to find one second hand which isn't easy or cheap.
I will never buy another google phone but I'm not really sure what my options are.
For the price of that phone I could buy 50 second hand android phones that would work much better. I also haven't seen any evidence that purism will be selling replacement parts or that parts will be available in 3+ years when they are needed.
Well I would hope so, considering Pixel phones cost double or triple what Nexus phones did.
I remember when Google bought Revolv and then stabbed all their customers in the back by bricking all their home automation and then graciously offering them a discount on a new Nest home system.
Google would remotely brick pacemakers if they stood to make money off doing so and anyone who thinks they can be relied upon long term is a bloody fool.
I'd argue Google doesn't support them at all. They don't have repair centres, they don't sell parts - if I break a screen in my OnePlus, I can send it back to OnePlus and have it replaced with a genuine part for £79 last time I checked. With Google I know someone who cracked the screen in the Pixel 4 and Google's response to it was "well, sucks to be you, we don't repair any phones at all". That's shocking, and unacceptable for any hardware product.
that's cute. 2011 you say? you can run android 10 (current latest release) on galaxy s2. released in 2011. and it's actually usable, because screencandy has been removed to give it a perf boost. can you run ios 13.6 on your 2011 iphone 4s?
i know in the iphone world it's important how long apple updates it. in the android world that doesn't apply. the manufacturer doesn't have to. because literally anyone can, and does.
> in the android world that doesn't apply. the manufacturer doesn't have to. because literally anyone can, and does.
I have two problems with this model. The first is that it really only applies to the kind of people who would be in this thread on HN - consumers at large are not updating their phones based on some community-supported Android rom.
The second is this: do we really want to train non-technical people that it's ok to let random organizations on The Internet control the operating system on their phones? These are deeply personal devices that can be relatively trivially turned into 24/7 remote surveillance stations, and say what you will about open source but with rare exception these roms are not undergoing line-by-line code audits.
In my opinion, the world is better served when companies support their own hardware.
If it turns out that Apple is spying on users, we have legal recourse. If orchiddroid928 on GitHub is doing it, that's a different ballgame.
linux is community supported. just like you can get linux from redhat, you can get your android rom from large companies. lineageos is a popular one.
i won't argue with the rest of that, as you are arguing open source is inferior. one you convince every enterprise out there not to use open source, you can revisit this with me.
you are also arguing all servers and consumer pcs should be made by microsoft, since they run windows.
I don't know what Linux has to do with this and I won't litigate the open source dogma, but on this point:
> you are also arguing all servers and consumer pcs should be made by microsoft, since they run windows.
That's not really what I'm saying at all; this isn't like e.g. expecting to get Windows updates through Dell, it's more like expecting that Dell will continue to deliver compatible drivers for their hardware that enable the updates I get from Microsoft to keep working.
That's a basic expectation when we buy PC hardware, in part thanks to the relative standardization of PC components - if I couldn't update Windows ~2 years after I bought a laptop and Dell's answer was "maybe someone in the community can help you", I'd be incensed.
In the smartphone/tablet market, that's just business as usual.
The only reason that PC hardware is standardized is because MS and Intel came up with standards in 1995 and continue to update them along with other committees.
Dell doesn’t have to release new drivers. I installed Windows 10 on a Dell E6500 Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz laptop that was sold in 2009.
My mom still occasionally uses my Mac Mini Core Duo 1.66Ghz from 2006 with Windows 7. This was without any drivers from Apple. Windows 7 recognized everything.
Going even further back, I bought a DX/2-66 DOS Compatibility Card from Apple in 1994 that came with Windows 3.1. I upgraded it to Windows 95.
Microsoft figured out how to nourish a platform over 25 years ago. Google and Android - not so much.
you update drivers on your phone? i just flash a new rom. it's got all the drivers i need in it. and on a phone from 2011, i can put the latest operating system. you cannot. you then spout the superior glory of being stuck on an outdated version because you got a security patch. how is that superior to also security patches, and even latest os if you want?
you don't need anything from dell to update windows. you literally just install windows.
the reason i bring up linux isn't clear? because android runs on it.
a normal person downloads a recovery app and the rom, and uses the app to flash any rom they want. what you're saying is you'd rather get your windows updates from lenovo. software and hardware are different things.
I’m all in on Apple phone-wise due to having too many Androids die on me in one year but the point about 3rd parties supporting some old hardware is very true. I have an ancient Barnes & Noble Nook tablet that I flashed with a custom rom and the thing is really snappy and responsive. The battery holds a charge and everything it’s really surprising.
can your mom upgrade windows 7 to windows 10 without you helping her?
i actually do know what's in the rom. and so does. anyone else who wants to check. and you have hundreds of 3rd party people who do. source code is available. you're literally arguing hardware and software should be tied together to the hardware manufacturer. the entire world of computers disagrees.
>can your mom upgrade windows 7 to windows 10 without you helping her?
Quite possibly, yes! I recall Microsoft pushed upgraded to Windows 10 quite aggressively at the beginning to the point it basically scheduled automatic upgrade. That was 5 years ago, I might not recall correctly.
The big difference between iOS/Windows 10 upgrades and installing custom ROM is that in the iOS/Windows 10 case, you click one button (or even let it install automatically!) and it installs itself. It cannot be easier probably. I can expect it was reasonably tested and that it's reasonably safe.
With custom roms, it really needs to be your hobby to do that. For majority of people, it's not viable solution to do that - they lack time and/or knowledge.
Putting Android 10 into Samsung Galaxy S2 is kinda like putting Corvette V8 engine into VW Beetle. It's possible, there are people that did it, but it requires skill and time to do that.
We probably have (at least in part) Apple’s iOS enterprise success to thank for this. No procurement manager is going to sign off on a fleet deal for 10,000 phones without some long-term support assurances.
Google seems completely uninterested in servicing that market with hardware. They could’ve absolutely dominated e.g. aerospace MRO with Glass + pixel tablets but instead most companies are just building iPad apps.
Had Google been serious about the Nexus it would have made contracts that would legally bind those maker to how many years Google would see fit, and they would have to provide such support or pay compensation when not.
Google excuses only work for those that don't understand law.
Google fiber support is terrible too. There is no way to transfer service to another address. Instead you have to sign up with a different Google account at the new address.
Absolutely. The fact that they choose to not provide this guarantee is a major red flag and a strong reason for me to not spend money on that platform. On the other hand, I have zero concern that my digital licenses of XBox or PlayStation games will vanish within the next couple decades.
Well, you should have a little concern. On my switch, I can buy games either digitally or physically for just about the same price. I buy most games physically, as one cannot guarantee the server that downloads games will work in 10 years (my Wii doesn't do this type of stuff now, but its less integral).
Pretty much any online game will be shut down, its just a case of when.
> as one cannot guarantee the server that downloads games will work in 10 years
While true, the pain point with Stadia is you have no downloads, for better and for worse. If Nintendo take their download servers down, you can still play all of your downloaded purchases.
On that note, I have much more faith in Nintendo's future handling of digital purchases this time around. They've put a lot more effort into the Switch's digital services compared to the Wii, which at times felt like an afterthought with the whole "WiiWare" artificial gatekeeping fiasco.
I'm a big fan of Stadia but really can't argue against this thought process. It would be nice if Google had some way of marking products that were potentially going to be cancelled vs those that have passed the threshold and will not go away unless Google is in danger of going away completely.
Reader really looks like the breaking of a dam in hindsight.
If Stadia were just a monthly subscription and you could play all the games, it wouldn't be hard to swallow because they just stop charging you when the service goes down and you got your value out of it while you had it.
It's the "purchasing" of the digital good that's the problem because you loose access to something that you think you "own" when in fact it's more of a lease.
There wasn’t any confusion. Their point was they’d much rather pay a monthly fee, because as it is, paying full price to “own” a Stadia game is ridiculous because Stadia is going to end up dead like most other google services and all the games you “own” will likely disappear.
The problem is that Valve doesn't have a history of just cancelling their products and shutting their customers out. Google does, and an extensive one. So when they offer a service where you can buy software and said software will only work for as long as Stadia is around, I don't trust Google that service will exist in 3 years. And once it finally dies what will Google do? Give everyone AdWord vouchers?
Those 3 along with maps, ads, and a handful of others make up the list of "safe" Google products.
I agree with you though, it is the niche products that get shutdown. My point is that being an early adopter of Google products is a very risky move. Until a product is adopted by the masses and profitable, it should not be considered safe.
Back in the day, I used to be all in on the Google bandwagon. I was in on Wave, Buzz, Meebo and bunch of others. After a few years of cycling through the standard phases:
1) Wow this is really cool
2) Wow I'm starting to use this everyday
3) Wow my friends should know about
4) Google is killing this
Once you get over the idea their killing something you started to rely on and then you experience their "customer service" a few times you just wonder if its actually about trying to make the world a better place, or just adding revenue to their bottom line.
My conclusion a long time ago was not to use them for anything personal and FFS nothing I would have my business rely on.
Several years later, Wave was especially disappointing to me: It was Slack, before Slack was a thing. They just didn't know how to market Wave, so no one knew why it was useful.
If Wave was first released a couple years later, with identical functionality, I think it would've done well.
The same problem applies though. It's not just services disappearing, it's the complete lack of support for services.
I'm in the process of moving everything off of my gmail email as I have a friend that recently lost access to their gmail account. There was no way for them to get it back – no human to speak with, no steps that they could follow to recover their account. They were supposed to be able to "sign in with an old device", but that didn't work either. Just gone. And apparently this has happened to a lot of people.
The founders are not joining Google and from what I heard employees were not even offered interviews, despite the announcement that the company was going to join their offshore location in Canada. It's a pure patent play, acquiring the Vaunt patents from Intel.
Every product relies on an external ecosystem for it to be useful. The lesson is to that if you're buying a product that isn't already highly successful, don't get too attached. Incidentally, the vast majority of the world already learned this lesson, it's the reason why most people aren't early adopters, nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, etc.
Once an android phone stops receiving updates, its only a matter of time until google play services stops working on that version of android, and then it becomes a big PITA to do anything google related with it, as it keeps redirecting away from web pages you to apps that tell you that you can't use them.
I wouldn't rely on Android to not go anywhere.
The new Android version might have introduced features that render that old app worthless.
Examples of such changes.
Locking down use of private APIs (abused by some apps), locking down NDK to the official Android native APIs and public shared objects, both cases app gets killed when doing naughty stuff, sandboxed file system (now really enforced in upcoming 11), permissions (now enforced with the Play Store minimum target version), and a couple more.
So if the app happens not to be constantly updated, it might just be rendered worthless with a new Android phone.
Not just Google buy any company's cloud-connected product.
I have a Roomba i7, and it works well, but it's 100% reliant on a web connection to control and to train it's automapping feature.
If iRobot gets bored with the model and decides to discontinue it and the cloud host, am I going to be stuck with an expensive paperweight, even it's mechanically still in great condition?
In an ideal world, Google could keep all the endpoints up and functioning. The issue is as software ages, exploits turn up and you end up requiring a team to just maintain a service with no future.
> Some customers will ask the question "So what happens when you get acqui-hired in a year and your parent company decides to shut down your service either immediately, or a year after they tell customers that everything will continue unchanged?"
An acquihire is not the most likely outcome. The most likely outcome is that the startup will fail, possibly pulling support for the product with no advance notice.
An acquihire or acquisition is one of the best chances customers have for continued support, unless the startup manages to go public and survive on its own.
So in this case, "after" means "one month before".
---
Incidentally, there is an issue of ambiguous/confusing phrasing in the official announcement. It says "refunds will be given for all paid Focals orders starting June 30th, 2020". This could be interpreted to mean (1) that orders before June 30th will never be refunded or (2) that all orders will be refunded and the process will start on June 30th.
At least they’re issuing the refunds. Have bought products from other startups that went bust and they just send an email saying their product won’t work after X date, have a nice day.
Along with IoT devices, I think this is an area we need to see more clarity and maybe regulation. When you buy a device that relies on a remote service, then there should be a very upfront guarantee on how long it will work. Then the customer can factor that information into how much they are willing to pay.
Forgive my ignorance on the subject but if it's not government mandated then what's stopping them from going bankrupt and not respecting the guarantee?
If they set aside no money to keep the promise then they physically cannot do anything about it when they run out of cash to keep the external services running.
True, big companies would be able to continue the guarantee but if all companies are not forced to set aside some 'contingency' money in the event of failure to keep the services running would you trust them to keep their end of the bargain?
Would that not hurt the smaller companies more since you'd be less likely to purchase from them as theres nothing in place to say they must keep their promises?
Edit: Not saying it shouldn't be an option not to provide the guarantee, just maybe there should be something saying if they do provide it then they must keep their end of the deal in the event of bankruptcy
Even (especially?) oil companies can't be persuaded to set aside money to clean up their own damn wells, or at least their governments can't be persuaded to make them pay. We have zero chance here.
To be fair, North was going down the drain whether Google purchased them or not. Goog clearly just saw some assets that they thought were worth acquiring.
It's really odd that this is making the media rounds now, granted this is the most fair headline I've seen on it to date.
The fact that Focals v2 were being cancelled, and that all customers would receive refunds for their existing purchase was announced with the acquisition months ago...
If their second hand product is still under warranty I think they are entitled to a refund, since their glasses don't work anymore they are clearly defective.
Is there any legal obligation Google has to 2nd hand owners of these glasses, or is it just a kind gesture that they're refunding everyone?
I have to wonder what kind of secret sauce north had if they refund 100% of the revenue from the company after acquiring....unless they only sold a few units and this was just an acquihire
Google probably calculated it into the sale price. It's probably worth it to drop North's customer base vs have to deal with the glasses, sales and support for the next couple years (especially if they have to write bug fixes over time for these glasses).
The HN discussion from when the sale was announced [0] might be of interest. It definitely didn't sound like a company being bought for the product, and might not even have been an acquihire.
It was a patent acquisition. North had originally purchased patents from Intel when they abandoned their Vaunt project. [0]. From what I've been told the reason they are shutting down the existing glasses is because they won't be hiring from the company. The founders were also not hired as part of the deal.
The AGPL is designed to guarantee that end users can stand up their own cloud services.
Maybe after enough nerds get bitten by IoT, some will band together and build compelling AGPL infrastructure to support future products.
Most of these things are just a standard dumb device with a standard SoC wired in. I imagine there are plenty of smaller product integrators that just want to sell a widget and don’t care about software differentiation.
This is what happened in the 80’s and 90’s with PC clones. It only takes a slip up (like the PC BIOS and DOS) from one incumbent player, and then the consumers will win.
Wow, this seems extreme... not in keeping with the First Sale Doctrine.
> At the end of June, North announced it was being acquired by Google, and would not release a planned second-generation device.
It also said it would "wind down" its first generation smart glasses, released last year.
> Customers found out that meant the smart glasses would be rendered "dumb" through a statement published on the company's website[1] and by email.
I doubt it is being rendered dumb by, say, putting a different firmware on it. It probably just absolutely needs occasional or constant internet connectivity to their servers to work, and Google is shutting them down.
Do you know of alternate firmware for smart glasses? I’ve done some firmware patching before, but in the very much tool assisted way. I’m kind of bristling with anticipation with what could be possible with access to the firmware. Do you know much about these particular AR glasses, what software they could run, and how firmware could help? Other than keeping them from being bricked, I mean. Something tells me now may be the time to find a few pairs on the cheap.
> The first-sale doctrine is a legal concept that plays an important role in United States patent, copyright and trademark law by limiting the rights of an intellectual property owner to control resale of products embodying its intellectual property.
That means I should be able to sell my glasses to someone without the original creator causing problems with it. It's more complicated than that, but that's the gist.
If I bought these glasses and they shut down the service and refund me, fine, whatever. But what if I bought the glasses, decided 4 months later I didn't like them, sold them on Craigslist for $600, and moved on with my life? After the shut down I get $800 back, and the poor sap who bought them from me gets a pair of worthless glasses and a dead craigslist email. Luckily this company will most likely get away with it because of the "it's more complicated than that" part.
Suppose you have a 40Mbps vDSL setup, and you bought a $50 "router" to consume the 40Mbps vDSL signal and give you WiFi Internet access. You bought the router from your ISP outright, but it was supplied pre-configured with your username and password and so on because hey, they are your ISP.
A few years later you get fancy 10Gbps fibre Internet from a startup called say "Glass Everywhere" that thinks everybody should be doing live VR sessions. GE provides a new WiFi router, though it's unclear whether you actually own it or it's somehow rented with the service.
You sell the first WiFi router on Craigslist for $30.
The person who buys it does not get 40Mbps vDSL Internet service from your old ISP. Even though the router still has your old credentials for that ISP, you terminated the account weeks ago and it doesn't work.
Courts understand that the WiFi router, and the service it enabled access to, are not the same thing, and that you cannot possibly sell unlimited access to the Internet in the form of a WiFi router, you were just selling this object, and if the purchaser didn't understand what it's for Caveat Emptor because this is a private sale.
The glasses work fine. The "poor sap" got working glasses. The service went away. If you implied the service comes with the glasses, they might very well have a claim on you for it going away, and I'd recommend giving their $600 back, otherwise they got what they paid for, Caveat Emptor.
First Sale has been eroded to the point it's barely worth talking about, but it was never intended to apply to situations like this.
The first sale doctrine just means that you can re-sell a physical product embodying some IP without needing to get a license from the IP-owner to make the sale.
Technically, for refund/warranty/other ownership purposes, the second-hand buyer now stands in your shoes, and should be entitled to the refund. You could theoretically claim it yourself, but in many states would be committing fraud in doing so.
First sale only applies to the goods - it does in no way (or in any country) apply to services. It certainly does not require a company to offer a service for free in perpetuity.
You can still sell the glasses, first sale allows that. It doesn’t say they must maintain their value.
There may be a false advertising case or fraud case here I’m not sure - but this has nothing to do with first sale.
Remote bricking of a device I own without my knowledge AND consent is legally actionable if I know where to send the certified letter from my lawyer. In this case, I do.
You have no legal cause of action if the company is refunding your purchase of the device in full, or if you already sold the device to someone else.
Moreover, there is a difference between disabling the functionality of the device and disabling the remote (i.e., cloud) software the device may depend on to function. The first might be legally actionable, but the second is not.
> You have no legal cause of action if the company is refunding your purchase of the device in full [snip]
You absolutely do. Companies who sold you something do not have the right to steal it back in exchange for a refund. Its your device, the transaction has been made, they are out of luck. They can offer you 10000x the price you originally bought it for and you are still free to decline.
Of course, this (and basically all law surrounding ownership) applies to things and not services, and charitably I assume that these devices are stopping working because an online service is stopping working, and not because Google randomly decided to hack into your device and break it in plain violation of the law, but let's not pretend that "giving a refund" is a generally acceptable solution.
And of course... if you have a contract with North (now Google) guaranteeing that they will provide the service indefinitely, and that contract doesn't include a term allowing Google to stop providing the service, you could still sue for injunctive relief requiring them to continue running the service. I assume you don't just because most companies aren't stupid enough to give out such contracts.
You absolutely do. Companies who sold you something do not have the right to steal it back in exchange for a refund. Its your device, the transaction has been made, they are out of luck. They can offer you 10000x the price you originally bought it for and you are still free to decline.
You absolutely do not. Legal damages are measured in monetary terms, and your putative damages are the amount you paid for the good. If the company refunds that in full, you have no legal cause of action; moreover, you are likely to end up owing the company for the legal fees they incur in defending themselves.
They can offer you 10000x the price you originally bought it for and you are still free to decline.
You can certainly do so. And the court will almost immediately toss out any case you may file against the company.
And of course... if you have a contract with North (now Google) guaranteeing that they will provide the service indefinitely, and that contract doesn't include a term allowing Google to stop providing the service, you could still sue for injunctive relief requiring them to continue running the service.
I don't know where you learned law, but this is absolutely false. The primary remedy provided by the court system is monetary not equitable. Courts will rarely if ever grant an injunction requiring a company to keep operating a service. They don't even do that in discrimination cases. Courts generally award monetary damages to users that suffered economic harm as a result of the service being discontinued.
Moreover, under centuries of US and British law, any contract that has an "indefinite" length is merely deemed to have a "reasonable" length. Courts have invalidated contracts that attempted to bind one or both parties for infinite terms.
> You absolutely do not. Legal damages are measured in monetary terms, and your putative damages are the amount you paid for the good. If the company refunds that in full, you have no legal cause of action; moreover, you are likely to end up owing the company for the legal fees they incur in defending themselves.
Monetary damages are not measured in purchase cost, but replacement cost.
There are also punitive damages.
There is also jail time (if/when a prosecutor decides to charge the individuals involved).
> You can certainly do so. And the court will almost immediately toss out any case you may file against the company.
I think you're missing the important part where you are still the legal owner of the property. The judge will order them to return the property and the local prosecutor will charge them with possession of stolen goods.
> The primary remedy provided by the court system is monetary not equitable
Specific performance is a common form of remedy when damages would be hard to calculate (such as in this situation).
Moreover the monetary damages are not calculated based on the initial cost of the services (which may have been sold at a discount), but the damages at the current time (which may be substantially higher, or lower).
> Moreover, under centuries of US and British law, any contract that has an "indefinite" length is merely deemed to have a "reasonable" length. Courts have invalidated contracts that attempted to bind one or both parties for infinite terms.
You're not wrong, but "months or a few years" would not be past the "reasonable" limit in this case.
You're right: monetary damages are measured in replacement cost...based on the depreciated value of the item to be replaced. Meaning, less than the value you originally paid.
Jail time wouldn't apply in this case, and I don't know why you think it would unless you can cite a violation of criminal law.
The judge will order them to return the property and the local prosecutor will charge them with possession of stolen goods.
??? You still possess the glasses. Nothing was stolen from you. The company is merely turning off their servers on their property.
Specific performance is a common form of remedy when damages would be hard to calculate (such as in this situation).
Specific performance is a rare remedy, and would never be imposed when monetary damages are easy to calculate, as they are in this situation: you paid X for glasses, so X are your damages.
Moreover the monetary damages are not calculated based on the initial cost of the services (which may have been sold at a discount), but the damages at the current time (which may be substantially higher, or lower).
??? Monetary damages are based on reasonable damages for relying on a service, and moreover require damaged party to attempt to minimize damages by finding alternative services. I'm not aware of any unique service provided by the North glasses that could not be replicated through other devices and services.
> ??? You still possess the glasses. Nothing was stolen from you. The company is merely turning off their servers on their property.
Which hypothetical are we talking about, in every hypothetical involving replacement cost the device was either
- Stolen, this would fall under your local theft statute.
- Destroyed via an over the air update, this would fall under your local destruction of property statute, and would arguably fall under the CFAA federally in the US (I assume there is a similar Canadian law).
Notably neither of these hypotheticals are the other hypothetical (and as I said previously likely what actually happened) of them turning off online services.
> Specific performance is a rare remedy, and would never be imposed when monetary damages are easy to calculate, as they are in this situation: you paid X for glasses, so X are your damages.
This is not the case. Specific performance is a common remedy for unique devices/services that cannot be repurchased. Moreover "you paid X so your damages are X" is simply incorrect. It is "you cannot repurchase the services at this time so your damages are entirely unclear". If the company sold the services at less than the cost of the services (which is the logical implication of them deciding it is cheaper to attempt to refund you instead of continuing to run the servers), that is their problem not yours (under the assumption that you have a contract requiring them to continue to provide it).
Literally everything CAN be legally actionable. Unless it was previously explicitly agreed upon, a company can turn off a costly service they are providing at their will. Did you have an explicit agreement arranged? Again though... this has nothing to do with first sale.
When you buy the glasses, what exactly are you buying? Are you saying that you're literally just buying the locked down hardware and any software services running in the cloud are not included in the purchase? These services are provided purely out of kindness of the company?
> Are you saying that you're literally just buying the locked down hardware and any software services running in the cloud are not included in the purchase?
Legally (in every jurisdiction I’m aware of) yes.
If they misled the buyers with false advertising or committed fraud along the way that would be an issue but again... not a first sale issue.
Shame we'll never see specialized apps that show off it's uniqueness. (Most applications are built towards phones and watches, tablets, and other equipment is considered to be a much more limited interface)
I've followed North since they were Thalmic Labs manufacturing the Myo armband. They seemed to have good ideas but no real way to create the ecosystem a new device needs to actually be useful. The myo was super fun and I dreamt about what I could do with it...but never got around to making anything. It seems the rest of the ecosystem didn't either. So, now Myo and North glasses go down the drain...
At least I can still play with my Myo's whenever the mood takes me.
"But not all people who invest in startups will be that lucky."
Purchasing a widget from a company is not investing. Cut the bullshit.
Customers don't have the commensurate upside.
It's kind of wild that Google is pulling this kind of shit when they are getting grilled about whether the us should take a more expansive view of antitrust.
They ruined an independent product because they wanted the people that made it to work on their shit instead.
Not standing up for Google here as they've done this many times. However that being said I feel like there must be a better way of providing these sort of devices that depend on an external service so they can keep running.
I think in these cases there should be some sort of software 'escrow' type deal where in the event of them shutting down the companies that purchased them can go for full refund or the option of a partial refund but with the source code of the external services required to keep them fully operational. So if someone has built their model around a particular piece of tech they can continue operating until they have a proper solution to replace them.
Edit: Just realised I may have mistook these devices for those that are used by companies that provide training for specialist equipment (eg. Hololens). So my response was sort of company centric, not sure what a good solution is for ordinary consumer devices as I guess you can't expect people to run their own server just for the 'smart' features.
I have no opinion on that. My larger concern is this ecosystem that continues to produce tech garbage. At some point, we'll all have to reckon with it.
Only fools trust google at this point. It's just not worth it to ever at all invest in anything esp GCP. I look at my past investments of time and energy and tell literally EVERYONE I KNOW to look elsewhere.
what are you talking about? how is gcp even relevant here? Apple acquired a weather app (DarkSky) and promptly killed their Android app. Do you, based on your logic, think someone who was planning to buy an ipad is now going to think twice?
It would be like buying a TV and your cable subscription runs our making the TV useless. Even though the hardware is OK it's the back end that failed not the hardware.
> On one hand Google is the lesser evil between M$ and Apple.
While I acknowledge this is certainly a highly subjective perspective, it is rare that I hear of Google being "less evil" than Apple. What either redeems Google or condemns Apple in your point of view?
Google of course is famous for doing this with many of its products, but in the long run this type of behavior can make it harder for startups to introduce new products/services. Some customers will ask the question "So what happens when you get acqui-hired in a year and your parent company decides to shut down your service either immediately, or a year after they tell customers that everything will continue unchanged?"
Of course the bigger lesson here is don't buy products which rely on a third-party service to function.