Philips Won't Block Third-Party Bulbs After All (engadget.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A day after Philips announced that it would drop support for third-party Hue bulbs the company has reversed its decision. An announcement reads is part: "We recently upgraded the software for Philips Hue to ensure the best seamless connected lighting experience for our customers. This change was made in good faith. However, we under estimated the impact this would have on a small number of customers who use lights from other brands which could not be controlled by the Philips Hue software. In view of the sentiment expressed by our customers, we have decided to reverse the software upgrade so that lights from other brands continue to work as they did before with the Philips Hue system."

Comments

Re:That Was Quick

[TWX]

I'm glad I sent that caustic, hateful tweet about it. It surely played a role in this decision.

I wouldn't underestimate the effect of directed complaints when those complaints become widely known. The bigger challenge is seeing that they don't re-reverse when the heat is off and think they can now get away with it once fewer people are paying attention.

I had to sit through a mandatory training the other day, and one study claimed that for every complaint vocalized by a person, there are twenty-six people that feel the same way but haven't expressed it back to the company. If even half that number is true then that's an awful lot of people that are unsatisfied. If this Philips product is fairly new and its development costs not yet recuperated then they can't afford for people to see bad-press and choose to remove it from consideration.