AI Summary
5 min readIn 1999, two Canadian entrepreneurs named Glenn Harris and Justin Henry were so fed up with the coffee table full of remotes—one for the TV, one for the VCR, one for the DVD player, one for the receiver, one for the cable box—that they decided to build a single device to rule them all. They called their company Easy Zapper, and their first product looked like someone had assembled a remote upside down: the screen was on the bottom, the buttons were confusingly arranged, and the whole thing felt like a prank. Yet beneath that bizarre design was a genuinely ambitious idea: a universal remote that could not only control every device in your living room but also learn their states, download TV listings from the internet, and even let you "zap" a recipe from a cooking show straight to your screen. It was a product that dreamed of being the mouse of the digital house—a decade before the smartphone made that vision obsolete.
The Problem That Wouldn't Stay Solved
Continue reading the full summary in the app — free to try.
Read Full Summary →Free • No credit card required
Never miss an episode of The Vergecast
Get every new episode summarized in your inbox — free, ~5 minutes to read.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Show Intro & Setup** - David Pierce introduces a Version History episode about the Harmony remote, with guests Nili Patel, John Higgins, and Matt Rogers (co-founder of Nest).
- 2 (04:37) **The 1999 Problem: The Living Room Nightmare** - The panel describes the pre-Harmony era of multiple, incompatible remotes for TV, VCR, DVD, receiver, and cable box.
- 3 (08:00) **The Origin: EasyZapper & the Hard Problem of IR** - Founders Glenn Harris and Justin Henry create "EasyZapper" (later Intrigue Technologies) to solve the universal remote problem.
- 4 (11:42) **The Vision: More Than Just a Remote** - The Harmony was designed to be the "mouse of the digital house," with ambitions far beyond channel changing.
- 5 (13:02) **The First Hardware: The Upside-Down Remote** - The team examines an early Harmony model, which is bizarrely designed with the screen on the bottom.
- 6 (26:00) **Logitech Buys In: The "Mouse of the Digital House"** - In 2004, Logitech buys Intrigue Technologies for $29 million, believing the remote will be the central controller for the digital home.
- 7 (33:52) **The Golden Age: The Harmony 880** - The 880 (2005) becomes the canonical Harmony design, with a top-mounted screen and a charging dock.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Guests on this episode
Show Notes
The Harmony Universal Remote was supposed to be the only controller you needed for all the devices in your life. So what happened? David Pierce is joined by The Verge’s Nilay Patel and John Higgins, as well as Nest co-founder (and current Harmony user) Matt Rogers, to follow the Harmony's timeline from its origins as the "Easy Zapper," through Logitech's acquisition, all the way to its slow death at the hands of smart TVs. And their vastly inferior remotes.
If you like the show, follow the Version History audio podcast feed to get every new episode.
Version History is also on video! Check us out on YouTube.
Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.
We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
More from this podcast
The Vergecast →