I hope not mapj1 ! I have tons of cloud connected hardware in my house. 

Thankfully I don't own any Hive products but we did have a similar issue a couple of years ago with Sonos who first announced they were stopping support for their older products but then backtracked rather sharpish after the flood of outraged customer feedback. I do have a number of Sonos speakers around my home, three of which would have ceased to work if they had stopped supporting them. 

I wonder if Hive will also reconsider given the feedback their customers have been giving them?  The amount of e-waste a decision like that causes is probably more an environmental issue than keeping it going surely? 

At the risk of going all Grumpy Old Man this is why I try to avoid cloud based systems as much as I possibly can. It's a great business model for the supplier - it ties you into their products and services which is a much better business model than selling bits of electronics where it's very difficult to make much margin. But as soon as the supplier decides there's a more profitable market elsewhere it's going to jump - leaving you, as you say, with e-waste.

I deliberately chose a non-smart TV when we recently upgraded our TV (much to our children's annoyance that now they've left home we've finally bought a largish HD TV - mainly though because of our failing eyesight!!). I can plug our £25 Roku box in and if Roku go bust or change markets I can plug someone else's small cheap box in, rather than having to risk scrapping a valuable (in environmental as well as cost issues) TV screen. But it was pretty difficult to find one - I got it by buying a "last year's model".

I wouldn't like to guess how this will all pan out, my instinct is that we are now so used to throw-away electronics that it will be taken for granted that this is just how life is. it's a very different way of thinking to the way I grew up with. Rather than buying a chunk of engineering to own and use it, it's buying a chunk of engineering that gives you access to buy into an ongoing service: the chunk of engineering itself being as disposable as a train ticket.

Part of the answer probably is to toughen up the WEEE directive so that at least the cloud service provider has an environmental responsibility to proactively manage the e-waste it creates if it effectively obsoletes it (although I don't see this happening in practice as I'm sure Apple etc would lobby very hard against it!) The other side, as you say, is that depends how much the companies mind upsetting their consumers...and the last 30 years have shown that their marketing departments have been very successful in convincing us (or most of us) that it's a great idea to progress by throwing our perfectly good electronics away after a year or two... 

Oh dear, I have gone GOM...

I must confess to being on your side Andy - the idea of something that stops working at the first sign of internet failure or supplier bankruptcy feels like a recipe for a disaster at some point, and I go out of my way to avoid it.

Equally we both have worked with hardware of the sort that does a lot of damage if control is lost, and that is a different sort of design.

However it is not a popular view.

The idea of posting  the tons of now useless devices back to the company would be appealing if they had a physical address, but I suspect in many cases the offices etc are all rented and the kit made abroad and there is simply no provision. A change in WEEE like directive would  not work if the subsidiary company has folded.

Mike.

PS just seem this https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-62142208

it appears that BMW drivers can rent the option of over the network activated heated seats.  I am clearly alone in seeing a great hacking/ denial of service flaw with this, even ignoring the register quote that "it may feel like buying a mug and having to rent the handle". Which is a sentiment I agree with as well, but I do not have a BMW and probably never will.

mapj1 said:

. A change in WEEE like directive would  not work if the subsidiary company has folded.

Oh absolutely. As you can imagine I was thinking more of the business decision "we'll just drop that service line because we want to jump into a more profitable business" without having to take responsibility for the consequences...even then I'm sure it would be incredibly hard to police in practice...

Yes I dread the day (which I'm sure will come) when there will be no choice but to buy a car where aspects of it can be controlled remotely, not (entirely) because I don't trust suppliers to manage the remote control correctly, but because i don't want to change a five year old car just because a supplier's got bored of supporting it...or gone bust.  

mapj1 said:

However it is not a popular view.

Absolutely, since the early 1980s the MBA mantra has been "provide services, not products", which this is all tied up in. As I've mentioned before on here, I consider myself very lucky to have worked in two very different industries both of which were based around supplying electronic products that would keep operating for 30, 40, 50 years! Maybe the current global shortage of raw materials for electronic components could drive a rethink? Although wouldn't help with the original post where a company just decides to exit a market and doesn't care if it's customer's can find an alternative to their now dead lumps of silicon.

I don't own a BMW Mike as they don't seem to come with indicators...  Ahh but maybe they're another 'over the network' add on that some people haven't subscribed to...! 

Oh gawd...don't tempt them... 

Re BMW, the jokes are already out there https://newsbiscuit.proboards.com/thread/10552/offers-careful-considerate-subscription-ability

BMW offers “careful, considerate driver” subscription and ability to move from the middle lane

I don't suppose forcing manufacturers/suppliers to take back old kit will make much difference.  Some already do that.

The only cost to them is a pre-paid Jiffy bag for the customer to send back the dead kit.  They can then pass the gadgets onto a recycler.

mapj1 said:

appears that BMW drivers can rent the option of over the network activated heated seats.

I'm just trying to think through the ethics of this (having read through the article properly now). So BMW have built a car with all these features, but they are withholding them unless you give them more money. As opposed to the original "optional extras" principle which was that it would cost the manufacturer more to add the extra features, so you needed to pay them to do so (or could choose to go without). Actually this has been around for years in electronics - it's much cheaper to make one design of chip in volume but then sell differently priced variants, disabling the unpaid for functions. (And for those of us who are old enough, calling transistors in opaque cans OC71s, and transistors in clear cans OCP71 phototransistors for a much higher price!)  The argument I guess being that the average price paid covers the manufacturing costs, but some people are paying less and getting less and some are paying more and getting more so everyone's getting a fair deal. 

But it still niggles me - if I've engineered in a feature I'd like my customers to be able to use it! Even though I can see the counter argument of being able to still sell your product to people who can't (or don't want to) pay the higher price, no-one is exactly "losing".

Hmm...answers on a postcard please...and at least so far BMW haven't decided to get out of the car business and hence turned off (by default) everyone's optional extras... 

Ah yes - but those of us in the know just scraped the black paint off the OC71's