Nest 1st gen and 2nd gen thermostats no longer supported from Oct 25

Serious question: how long do you expect cloud hardware vendors to support the servers for their products? 10 years? 20? 30?

When it's a device intended to be installed permanently in a house that could last 100 years, controlling a device that could last 20-30 years, and the company still exists (and is worth trillions to boot), I think 30 years of support would be a completely reasonable expectation.

I don’t know how these were advertised when originally sold, but I think products like these ought to clearly display a minimum sever lifetime. Something like “Nest connected thermostat, with 10 years of guaranteed cloud connectivity” displayed relatively prominently on the packaging. Otherwise, if the vendor can arbitrarily remotely yank access to a key feature, then the consumer is being sold a false bill of goods.

Yes. Unless Google is going out of business?

Products are not services. If you buy a product that needs services to work, and at the time of purchase you are clearly informed that those services are subject to change at any time, you are sufficiently aware of the fact that product functionality may change at any time.

You’re still in the return window when you are presented with the service ToS.

liftime of the building it is installed in. if I choose to replace it that is fine but there are still buildings in use 1000 years later, you need to escrow enough to support servers that long just in case.

>Serious question: how long do you expect cloud hardware vendors to support the servers for their products? 10 years? 20? 30?

Serious answer: I do not expect any specific lifetime at all (though legal return period is an obvious floor), but at a bare minimum I do expect (and think should absolutely be mandated by law) that power be intimately tied to responsibility. Ie., it's fine if a hardware vendor decides to retire their cloud services (or OS updates or the like) in 1 year or 10 years or 20 or 30, but IF they cease to support it, THEN they must also remove any technical obstacles to hardware owners pointing it at another service of any kind. So any signing keys required, code, docs/APIs etc. Decide that a given product no longer makes commercial sense for you to produce or support? Sure, fine, it happens. The problem is then ensuring the hardware/software dies with that.

The basic issue is that these places generally want to have their cake and eat it too. They want all the financial power of a monopoly tie-in and feudal rent extraction, but no responsibilities to go with it and the ability to force customers onto new stuff (or nothing). That should be illegal. Honestly, I think any tie-in should be illegal, fully accessible local APIs should be required and any 1st party subscription should earn its place on its merits.

But at a minimum, no one should be able to have it both ways. If they want power over their customers, they should have responsibility proportional to that. And conversely if they go full open source community friendly hackable from day 1 (and are fully upfront about that), I'm fine saying they have very minimal long term responsibility. There can and should be room for many different approaches to the market, but not extractive lock-in.

We’re retiring something like this at work. The devices were manufactured between 2009-2017. They will continue to operate in non-smart mode until some other part of the device breaks. We’ve notified customers and no one seems particularly upset. To a large degree it seems like the fleet’s obsolete and we could’ve pulled the plug a couple years ago. There’s probably not a good answer in a general sense. It really depends on a host of things.

> no one seems particularly upset

I wonder if that's because the ones that would be upset never bought them in the first place.

As long as the company or a company buys their liabilities is solvent. Companies are in the business of providing value to the consumer not generating ewaste for a tax writeoff. If they want to do that the consumer should know that the hardware will break in x years and they can pay for ewaste disposal or bundle that into the price of the item. Bitrot is propaganda. It's absolute insanity that google can write off profits from their monopoly position by funding a never ending stream of failed projects that are both environmentally and socially harmful This company just spent $75 billion on cloud hardware while killing cloud iot devices as "unprofitable" when they mean "unprofitable for them" they don't eat the cost of having to replace their thermostats during the largest unemployment crisis in the IT space ever. You make it make sense.

As long as the company or a company buys their liabilities is solvent. Companies are in the business of providing value to the consumer not generating ewaste for a tax writeoff. If they want to do that the consumer should know that the hardware will break in x years and they can pay for ewaste disposal or bundle that into the price of the item. Bitrot is propaganda. It's absolute insanity that google can write off profits from their monopoly position by funding a never ending stream of failed projects that are both environmentally and socially harmful This company just spent $75 billion on cloud hardware while killing cloud iot devices as "unprofitable" when they mean "unprofitable for them" they don't eat the cost of having to replace their thermostats during the largest unemployment crisis in the tech space ever. You make it make sense.

Google doesn’t owe you anything after purchase.

Google does quite literally owe their shareholders ROI, by law.

Why would one expect them to do anything other than the minimum support period and expense that they can get away with that won’t trigger a class action?

There are no surprises or bait and switch here. Nobody was promised eternal support or updates.

It’s a business, not a charity.

Even if we're not going to require functionality last more than 0 years, the 0 year promise should have to be written on the box in medium or large text.