My immediate reaction when I saw this:
Why would you give @Google control over anything in your home? https://t.co/4OwqMRTgM9
— Geoffrey Miller (@primalpoly) December 16, 2020
was absolute agreement. Why would anyone entrust Google with their home lighting? It’s the perfect hot take.
Then I started thinking about it. Sure, Google had that outage that disrupted everyone using Google’s home automation but how often do those outages happen? As compared, say, to your power company?
Anyone who’s been around here anytime at all knows that I’m not an apologist for Google. Far from it. But whatever else you can say about them, they are really good at engineering reliable systems at scale. Here’s Paul Graham’s reaction to the outage:
There’s a lesson here: the better you are, the more preposterous the theories people will invent to explain your (real or apparent) lapses. If GMail were run by a less competent organization, my initial guess would have been the correct one: that it was down.
— Paul Graham (@paulg) December 14, 2020
The idea of a Google outage seemed so unlikely to him that he embraced a preposterous explanation instead.
So will I be installing Google home automation at the Irreal bunker? No, of course not. Even putting aside my no Google rule (unless it’s YouTube or something else passive that can’t reasonably be replaced) I simply don’t trust Google not to retire the system and brick my devices when they get tired of the product or decide I’m thinking impure thoughts. Still, if you’re not worried about the privacy aspect or the longevity of Google’s commitment, there’s no real reason not to use their system. It’s probably more reliable than the rest of the infrastructure supporting your house.