The devices were sold with the implicit promise that the servers operated by the manufacturer would remain in service, so I don't think there's much of a real distinction between bricking a device by shutting down servers vs. hitting it with a hammer.
That said, they probably tried to weasel themselves out of any obligation via the EULA.
Another company swooped in, and bought them in 2014 - they immediately stopped all sales of Revolv products, but decided to keep the Revolv service running for nearly two years afterwards, for the older customers.
However, eventually, they seem to have decided to pull the pin - perhaps they knew it'd just keep bleeding money. After all, Revolv never made money, and they haven't sold any units in nearly two years, so they have zero revenue to show for it.
Either way - how exactly do you see it as reasonable that they should keep them up ad infinitum?
I mean, say Revolv had just gone under, and nobody had swooped in to save them, and keep them on life-support for two more years.
Would you still be yelling about the EULA means a bankrupt company should still keep paying it's server bills?
I somehow doubt Jeff Bezos is coming to leap in and be like, "Gee, you're bankrupt. Don't worry, here's a couple million dollars of AWS credits, to keep your servers running for two years. And don't worry, in two years, I'll give you a few million dollars more, cause I'm just a nice guy. Oh, and here, let me load you five of my software engineers, and a couple of my site reliability engineers, in case it crashes."
This is nonsense. A company "swooping in" to buy a company assumes the liabilities of that company.
If Alphabet were to buy a struggling company, they don't get to go to it's creditors and say "We will pay you $1, which you should consider a blessing, since if the this company went out business you would have got nothing".
Similarly, if the company made sales of a product on the notion of "lifetime support and updates", a purchasing company is absolutely responsible to uphold those guarantees (this is the type of thing companies do due diligence for before acquiring a business).
Yeah, right because this company that swooped in to do the saving did it out of the goodness of their hearts and did not see any benefit to doing so whatsoever.
Well, if this company happens to be a publicly held company then its investors should be mad about this habit of going in and buying companies that are not of value to them.
But I bet they did see a value, but where there is value there can also be liabilities and you have to assume both of them. You don't get to choose just the value.
I never said they did it from the goodness of their hearts.
I said, they swooped in - then ceased all sales of Revolv products. I have no insight into why - but perhaps they figured Revolv nearly went bankrupt selling these damn widgets, why would we keep selling them as well. But then instead of shutting the servers down right then, decided to pay to keep them running for nearly 2 years.
I'm sure they had rational reasons for buying Revolv, even if the product never took off.
And perhaps they had reasons for delaying the shutdown for two years.
See, that's the thing I don't get - the company basically failed - somebody comes in and buys it up, and keeps the lights on for two years, possibly to avoid exactly the nerd rage we're seeing now. But then the nerds rise up and rage anyway =).
Hell hath no fury like a nerd with a grudge...haha.
Seriously, some of the things that we as a company get up in arms about - if you actually talk to mainstream people, they're like, huh?
The picture you paint is confused at best. It's clear that the company had some assets that made it worthwhile to "swoop in" instead of allowing the company to shutter and to buy the assets in a fire sale during bankruptcy.
But it appears that those assets were not it's products, and not it's customers. So, now that they own the company, and the relationships with the customers, they decide to not honor their product with those customers.
I suppose that's fine. But you should not be surprised if people read that as a signal that Nest will do the same thing with any of their other products.
If you've got a device that can't run without access to remote servers, despite purely local functionality, then turning off the servers is just as pointlessly destructive as coming to your house and hitting the device with a hammer. If this was a device whose core functionality legitimately required connectivity, that might be different, but it's not.
The nest is affixed to a wall via quick-release bolts so that if it's mounted too high to reach, you can remote-eject it.
Properly reprogrammed, the incendiary charge on the quick-release can act as an autodestruct. Beyond vaporizing the device, in some cases it's taking out a chunk of wall or the family pet.
