The Logitech Harmony was the best universal remote ever built, and it still failed. That is the central fact of this Version History episode, and it is worth sitting with before you press play.
The Verge's David Pierce and Nilay Patel bring in Matt Rogers, CEO of Mill and co-founder of Nest, to trace how a product that solved a real, obvious problem could not survive the market. The conversation covers why hardware that works is not always hardware that wins, and what the Harmony's collapse reveals about the broader graveyard of universal control systems.
The full episode is worth your time not for the eulogy but for the diagnosis. Rogers has built and lost hardware products at scale. His read on why the category never cohered is specific and unsentimental, and it applies well beyond remote controls.
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