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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello, and welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of IR Blasters. I'm your friend, David Pierce, and our regular show is off today, but we want to play you an episode from the new season of Version History. Version History, if you don't know, is our show about old technology. We tell the story of some of the most important products in tech history.
On this episode, it's one of our favorites. It's the Harmony Remote, the universal remote that promised to give you one thing to control everything. It's me, Nilay Patel, The Verge's John Higgins, and Matt Rogers, the former co-founder of Nest. Nest, by the way, another episode we're doing this season, but Matt demanded to talk about Harmony. It's a really fun episode. I think you'll enjoy it.
Here it is. Around the turn of the century, two guys in Canada had an idea that maybe they could build a product that could simultaneously control your TV, your home theater, your VCR, your DVD player, and everything else in your living room. and that maybe if they could get that product into your living room, all that would be just the beginning.
From the Virgin Vox Media, this is Virgin History, a show about the best and worst and strangest and most important products in tech history. I'm David Pierce, and today it's time for the story of the Harmony Remote.
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Chapter 2: What is the Harmony Remote and why was it created?
CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. Support for this show comes from Odoo.
Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost.
That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.
Remember the three R's? Reading, writing, and arithmetic? Well, we aren't really doing that second one anymore.
On average, teachers report spending as little as 10 minutes a week on teaching handwriting explicitly in kindergarten classrooms.
This week on Explain It To Me, handwriting's recession and renaissance. Find new episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts.
All right, we're back. It is time for what I think is going to be a strangely heated conversation about TV remotes. Joining me in the studio, Nilay Patel. Hello. How many Harmony remotes would you say you've owned and used over the years? Over half a dozen, which is a lot. I mean, a lot. This category lasted maybe 10 years, and I had over six is what I'm going to say.
Also here, John Higgins, our TV and audio reviewer. You have as long a history with Harmony stuff as just about anybody, it seems like. Harmony remotes were one of the first things that I reviewed back 20 plus years ago when I was at Home Theater Magazine.
Also joining us remotely, Matt Rogers, CEO of Mill, the co-founder of Nest back in the day, who I will just say fairly straightforwardly demanded to be on this episode. Matt, welcome to the show. I have a lot of opinions about this. Yeah. Tell us briefly about your Harmony history. I had no choice. There's nothing else out there like this.
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Chapter 3: How did the Harmony Remote evolve from the EasyZapper?
And again, this is like the early Internet days when there's a real sort of Internet 1.0 belief that maybe one of the most important computers you own will be your television. Like you might have a computer on your desk or whatever, but maybe you'll come home and you'll do a computer on your TV. That didn't pan out.
But this is the thing they're trying to do, and the EasyZapper idea is maybe we can be the literal remote for that, that this can be the way that you watch television and the way that you buy things. So even in their press release launching this thing – and again, this is what zapping is. You're zapping things to and from the internet, which I think is a cool phrase that we should bring back.
Yes.
It says with this feature, Zaps, you can buy a music video, link to new sports equipment, or lift a recipe from your favorite cooking show. You will never have to do a web search for something you saw on TV again. Well, then. What an idea.
So again, this is like, they very much are thinking about this as more than just a way to control all of your stuff, but they have to control all of your stuff in order for this to work. Like Matt, you have a long history in smart home stuff. And I just want to know your read on this as a smart home guy. Cause like in a very real way, this is not a TV product. This is a smart home product.
Yeah, it really is. 25 years ago. Is there something to this? Oh, absolutely. Again, also, this is an era in history where the other side of kind of smart home was extremely high-end custom integration, you know, wealthy people spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to have these control boxes that allowed them to change the channel and have all their systems work with one remote.
The era of Crestron, for example. Yeah. custom integrators. So this idea that everybody could get that technology and control all of their home theater with one thing is, I mean, it's kind of a bold statement at the time. John, do you remember in these early days, like you were covering this stuff from the TV side. Did this actually have legs at the time, did you think? Yeah, absolutely.
Because it was, as Matt just said, they were trying to cater to the people that wanted the control for the restaurant systems. And have them be more accessible in their homes that they could do. They didn't have to pay somebody to come in and set up their TV, their curtains, their lighting.
I just want to take a pause here and point out that the smart home integrator market is bigger and more lucrative than ever because this problem has not been solved.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did the Harmony Remote face in the early 2000s?
And, Neil, I have a sentence that is going to make you feel so many feelings. And I would like everyone to react to this sentence. This is from Garino DeLuca, who was the Logitech CEO at the time. He said, and I quote, we see the remote control as the mouse of the digital house.
Ha, ha, ha, ha.
I believe he said that earnestly and with a straight face. John, how does that make you feel? I don't know, a little dirty, maybe? Never rhyme in like... What is this? Oh, gosh. The mouse of the digital house. Green and DeLuca, he has like a bunch of these. Like he's a character in the industry at this time. Well, very much so. And Logitech is also like kind of on top of the world.
This company is making very good stuff. The other phrase they use a lot is they like last inch devices. They make a lot of mice and keyboards and it's like they talk about, you know, last mile with delivery stuff. He's all about the last inch. We used to call those accessories. What fun is that? That's great. Maybe my computer is an accessory to my keyboard, Matt.
The mouse for your digital house really, really misses on where the computer of your digital house will be. This is a vision that's like, it's not really a computer somewhere. So this is a fascinating thing because this is 2004, right? So this is before the iPhone. This is before smartphones even are ubiquitous everywhere. But, like, we're deep in, like, the BlackBerry age by now.
We're doing phones with internet access. It's already commonplace. clear to some people who are paying attention that we are starting to move into a new kind of device with a new kind of powers. And they're here being like, it's the remote control. And so this is, I just want to pause at this moment and ask, in 2004...
Should Logitech have bought this company for this giant vision of what it was going to do for the home, or was it already barking up the wrong tree?
I think they got sold the dream. I think, again, knowing how the accessory business works. You sell these very high-margin accessories. They're probably 50%, 60% margin on these things. But they're chasing this dream of, can we be a services business? Can we be an advertising business?
TiVo had gone public a few years earlier. Web TV got bought by Microsoft for a gazillion dollars. So they're probably looking at that as, hey, we need to get a piece of that market, too. Yeah. And owning and controlling the user interface is always where the power is, right? Yeah. So all those things came with remotes.
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