Good, maybe that will be enough to finally dissuade my sister from using those damn surveillance devices throughout the house.
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“If you haven’t been using Google products for your smart home needs, it may seem surprising that Google could so suddenly and rapidly drop the ball on an entire ecosystem of hardware and software.”
Um, no. At the risk of sounding unbearable smug, this is exactly why I haven’t been using Google producs for my “smart home needs” in the first place.
Make two little lists:
(1) Products Google has introduced and still maintains.1)
(2) Products Google has introduced and discontinued.
Which list is longer?
1) Whether those products have gotten better or worse (or have retained basic functionality) over time is neither here or there.
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Yeah. Literally the first thing I thought of when Google smart devices were brought up. Surprisingly ahead of surveillance.
I was burnt by Google or people I knew were 15-20 years ago so I have never been tempted.
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I’ve specifically avoided buying anything “smart” from Google. Specifically the Ring doorbell camera and the thermostat.
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Ring is Amazon, Nest is Google.
That’s not an endorsement for either. Ring has an established habit of sharing footage with law enforcement without permission.
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Yeah they’re all a blob of awfulness in my mind so i don’t bother too much making distinctions i guess lol.
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I hear you, they are all uniformly awful at selling, exfiltrating, or just leaking your personal data.
Google though, is spectacularly bad at just turning off whatever it is you have grown to rely on or paid them for.
It’s like their USP when “be really evil” simply doesn’t separate you from the pack.
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Right, just like the PC was going to be obsolete by the year 2000 because of wearables.
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From my cold, dead hands.
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So a computer that takes much longer to communicate with, will wear out your voice by the end of the day, be difficult to use at home, and make an office even more of a noisy hell. All for the low price of one environment. Sounds great, except it seems to be predicated on having “unlimited compute in the form of quantum”, which means this pointless dystopia will always be five years away.
Still I’m sure some investors are telling him to shut up and take their money, which is all that counts. 
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It also assumes that such a computer will understand everyone’s voice at all times, that you talking to your computer will not be disruptive (imagine working at an office where everyone is talking at their devices non-stop to get work done), and it also assumes that people even have the ability to talk.
I do think that having voice as an accessibility option is great but i doubt it’ll ever be the default.
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Star Trek showed us a world where Picard could ask the computer to make tea, but the engineers and doctors could still do things without everyone simultaneously having long conversations to try to get anything done. “Next screen, next screen, next screen, yeah, zoom into the quadrant kind of in the lower left there, no further left than that, ok but it’s moved now.” Why isn’t anyone inspired by Star Trek any more? All the ideas the tech bros have instead are so much worse.
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Remember when requests for feedback about products and services were collected on little cards next to a cash register? 
Also, shoppers could just pass them by while making a purchase. Good times…
Seth Meyers rants about requests for ratings and reviews making the customer experience much worse:
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The second one there is one of the only two notices that I insist atay beside our desk front desk in my library.
That and a football comic strip by David Squires with all the words from Dead Flag Blues by Godspeed you black emperor.
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Cause it’s woke?
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