A little over a month ago, I wrote a post about why I was unplugging my Canary security camera. Canary was bait-and-switching its IndieGoGo backers with paid cloud storage plans. Alone, that wouldn’t cause me to abandon ship, but the device itself was plagued with errors to the point where it only barely functioned as a security camera. The paid plans felt like an insult.
The post caught the immediate attention of Canary, and I was contacted by Jon Troutman, Canary’s Chief Design Officer, who agreed to meet with me in New York City and chat about their product and services.
Last week, Canary bit the bullet and introduced their paid cloud storage plans, placing all of their IndieGoGo backers on a 7-day “free trial” of the plan they’ve been using since January. Today, I unplugged my Canary. It’s now in its box, in my closet, gathering dust.
Jon Troutman is a great guy; I’m sure that the whole Canary team are great folks. I applaud him for meeting up with me, some random guy from the internet with an opinion, to talk seriously about his company and his work. It was above and beyond what I’d ever expect someone in his position to do.
We chatted about his work at General Assembly before Canary, how the whole company got started, and a bunch more. Once we got into the meat of the conversation, though, it became clear that there were multiple different visions of Canary even at the top of the company.
Troutman is a great example of a person who doesn’t need Canary, and admitted so himself. His wife and children are always home, so there isn’t the danger of an intruder going unnoticed. He’s never had a major security incident. Troutman said he values his Canary for capturing moments of his family while he’s away.
This is great if you’re one of their customers enjoying an alternative use case for what is primarily a security device. But it’s not great if you’re the company’s chief of design and you’re unable to relate to your users. Being able to separate your own preferences from your users’ is essential in product development.
The more we talked about Canary, the clearer it became that Canary isn’t a security camera. It’s… well, they don’t seem to know what it is. In fact, the most common response I heard from Troutman when I expressed that the Canary app doesn’t seem built around security was that they “have a lot of use cases,” or “everyone uses Canary differently”.
In my view, a security camera only has two purposes: to make you feel safe when nothing unwanted happens, and to alert you immediately if something does. And it only has one use case: you put it where its sensors can work properly, and leave it alone. It’s the functional equivalent of a smoke alarm.
The Nest Protect smoke alarm is very aware of this, and makes a strong effort to get out of your way and never alert you except in a real emergency - exactly what I expect from a security and home health monitoring product. Contrast with Canary, which would send upwards of ten security alerts per day to my phone. I never felt less safe than when I had my Canary plugged in; its constant desire for attention made me paranoid that something unwanted was happening in my house.
Canary’s barrage of notifications makes sense if you want to see your spouse, children, and pets all the time. But that use case is diametrically opposed to that of security, because false alarms erode trust. I never, ever want to hear anything from my security alarm.
With these divergent views of Canary’s purpose at the top of the company, I’m not sure Canary will come together as a singular product. And, if it does, I’m not sure if that product will be a security camera.
There was a moment during the conversation where I told him that, if his product was working properly, I should never need to open the Canary app or check the device. His immediate response was something to the effect of “But what if I want to see cool stuff happening in my house?”
I told him to buy a Dropcam for that.
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