What happens when you depend on a platform or device and the company behind it moves on without you? Google is retiring the Bard name and releasing Gemini as both a chatbot and successor to Assistant, which it has used for its smartphones and smart home speakers. Coincidentally, it has begun deprecating certain features built in to Assistant, which is probably upsetting anyone with an old device. As someone who has experienced smart devices being left in the dust as companies continue their onward march into the future, I recommend against buying into one company’s platform, since you’ll end up having to replace everything in a few years.
Then again, maybe forced obsolescence is a blessing in disguise, as older technology may have unpatched vulnerabilities or be incompatible with current standards. How many of us have slightly older smart home devices running on 2.4GHz WiFi because they can’t use the modern 5GHz band? My old NAS became obsolete when Windows adopted a more secure version of the Samba file-sharing protocol. My old routers with insecure versions of WPA are properly and permanently retired. By contrast, the X10 modules and controllers that I bought in the 1980s for about $15 each are still trucking along, even as generations of smart tech have come and gone.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/08/technology/google-gemini-ai-app.html
