Why is it hard to find beautiful products that are respectful of their users’ privacy and are designed to last?
There’s such an opportunity for something that looks as good as the Nest, but doesn’t require two-factor authentication to replace. I didn’t want to call it dumb but beautiful, so let’s say “autonomous and beautiful” appliances and home devices. I still want it to be smart, but if you’re going to have the risk profile of a device that connects to the internet, it needs to be worth it, like Brilliant, Sonos, smart TVs, or connected cameras.
– Matt Mullenweg
One argument is that design talent is expensive, and that they work at those very companies whose idea of advanced equals internet connectivity.
Free/Open Source Software has disproved this for engineers. For over three decades it’s shown that the world’s best engineers can work on products that respect security, privacy and work independently of the Internet. It could be equally true of designers, and there are in fact well designed open source software products – take the Firefox browser or the KDE desktop environment or the NextCloud suite. One problem is that it isn’t mainstream yet.
The main problem, I think, is that great companies stay independent for shorter and shorter times. Nest was an independent company was less than four years from its founding to its acquisition by Google. That’s less time than you expect your thermostat to last. I have more to say on this but I’m organising my thoughts at the moment.