It's the surveillance home for marketing and ads. Actual smart homes need a lot more dumb and existing technology first.
If it were really smart, I'd have a toilet and shower that uses 1/4 of the amount water, my gas stove would not have a pilot light, and "dumb" motion sensors for light have been around quite a while - but not ubiquitous (more common the EU).
Commercial buildings have had computers driving heating and cooling systems for a couple of decades (without thermostats but with temp sensors) so you don't need internet for that either. And I've never seen a house with VAV's installed in the ducts to actively heat/cool only the occupied portions of the home. And the easiest of all before construction - just "rotate" the foundation towards the sun to take better advantage of passive heating and cooling, that's an easy 15% energy bill savings.
A gas water heater usually has an always on pilot light to avoid leaking unburned gas in case the main valve is stuck-open (or not fully closed). It's a failsafe, not a bug. (Which is why many heating systems refuse to turn back on automatically if they detect the pilot light goes off)
> Commercial buildings have had computers driving heating and cooling systems for a couple of decades
And they're expensive as fuck, and even today companies manage to mess up their setup (Berlin Airport cough).
Let me exagerate a bit, there are videos of people living in woods on youtube, I feel their 'home' is smarter than mine. Everything is crafted from almost nothing, full of nice geometry tricks (baskets, fire pump).
I worked for a short stint at a product development company that was getting into IoT. I came to the realization that IoT products are going to be just like the WWW in the early days - we are going to have a lot of dumb ideas before we have some really smart ideas.
We will have to endure the Internet of Stupid Things first, sigh.
One thing i wonder about - why does it take so much hardware and sales to try out a new consumer product concept ? Isn't there a process to aim the products better and a simpler way to verify them ? What is it, and why aren't more companies using it ?
As you mentioned the problem is IoT 'gone wild', not necessarily with home automation specifically. It's great to see companies in that space doing interesting research and coming out with useful products ... but this whole things seems more like a 'gold rush' for now. Maturity of this market will eventually come.
"No Wi-Fi, no heating" -- this makes no sense to me. I had a Nest and when the wireless network went away, it did the sensible thing and maintained its current schedule. The only thing it lost was remote control/monitoring and the ability to talk to Nest Protects.
This is not to say that Nest doesn't have problems, but there's no way I'd have allowed it in my home if an Internet outage meant freezing my family.
For my home, I fully believe that if things continue this way, I will need to have three networks at home. The household network and wifi for my wife and our family to use, the work network (hardwired Cat6 because that's how I like it) for my multiple work computers and NAS, and a third network with its own wifi just if IoT. IoT devices need not have access to the other two networks. It would be nice if this level of segmentation were to be built into the higher end home routers.
Personally, I enjoy setting my house up "like a data center". But that is far beyond most home owners' abilities or desires for their network.
I tried doing this - but there are two complications.
Firstly, how do you get your phone/server to talk to the IoT network? Some devices - like the Lifx - expect you to be in the same IP range in order to work properly.
Secondly, some IoT devices are wired into the network - specifically smart plugs which use powerline networking, and some HVAC stuff like Tado.
It's not an insurmountable problem, but requires careful configuration and accepting some loss of functionality.
That's why i'd like to see a separate network for IOT.
Think z-wave and friends. Then have an interchangeable controller which can be firewalled to all hell if you want and can run locally if you want as well.
This is how I have it set up. I have a separate network for IoT, with a home-built webpage to reach all of the devices using their API. No Net access for them. It works pretty well for me, but I'm guessing your average-joe doesn't want to write a webpage for every new gadget he gets.
I remember some years back an interview (maybe Bill Gates?) mentioning that software have a long way to go compared to other technologies.
E.g. If you turn on the oven and it doesn't work it's baffling, while for any program to just fail is expected.
Great to see we are fixing the gap by going in the opposite direction :)
You can improve the reliability of stuff like this by minimizing programmability and by using reliable parts. I have a mercury thermostat in the basement set to 12C connected directly across the heat demand leads. So my house is pretty much not going to freeze down no matter what the software does.
I have a mercury thermostat upstairs set to my normal indoor temperature. It is connected across the heat demand leads through a software controlled switch. So no matter what the software does, the house can not get too hot or two cold. This means that I only have two set temperatures, but in practice that is enough. Setback occurs whenever the system detects that the alarm is set or when I set it before I go to bed.
The alarm panel is a traditional system in a box with a separate backup battery. It tells the automation when it is armed. It can be disarmed from the automation with a code, which the automation has to generate as a hash from an electronic key.
Its an interesting point in the article about the indignity of smart TVs. I was contemplating getting a new TV, but I felt I was getting ripped off. I have a ton of external devices which handle providing Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Instant, whatever. I don't want to pay a huge premium on a TV because the manufacture thinks this is a novelty to me. As is evidenced in the article, I also don't want my TV to have a complicated OS that can literally crash when I attempt to change the channel.
Fundamentally, I just want my TV to be a display - an amazing display. I don't even want or need it to have those shitty speakers TVs necessarily have - I already have a fantastic sound system. I want as close to 100% of my money going into the quality of the picture, not huge feature lists I have no need for.
I've been shopping for the same thing for the past 2 years. All I want is a decent picture with low input lag (for gaming) at a reasonable price. That's it. But it doesn't exist anymore.
Every TV comes with enough bloatware to bring Watson to its knees. And the ones that manage to display a picture quickly despite that all extra processing start at $1,500, which is twice the price you would've paid 10 years ago.
I was given advice when shopping for a new screen to find the highest model range, as in the highest leading numbers, and then get the lowest number within that range as that usually trims out the "features". However, looking at LG's range of OLEDs, everything comes with "features", even the lowest model in the highest model range.
Consumer markets are generally awful at supplying what consumers want. For example, if you ask many consumers what would they like their white goods to have, is reliability at affordable price. But it's impossible to find, even though manufacturers have an amazing selection of materials to work with.
You can also use component following the KNX standard and build a smart home based on a standard (with about 400 providers of appliances, switches, etc.) and control it fully using open source software[1]. Note that the components can be programmed to work without any cloud or centralized control system. So, your heater will work even if your "app" to control it is not working because of a faulty update as everything can work in "standalone" mode.
The fundamental issue is that, if I were to put down a list of things I wish were easier/automated around the house, there's very little that overlaps smart home or home automation products.
- Heat control. OK but I have a non-network connected programmable thermostat that's really pretty effective.
- Vacuuming. OK. Roombas are a start in this direction although how effective they are depends a lot on your house layout.
- Clean up dirty dishes, wipe down counters, etc. Nope, unless you count my dishwasher.
- General food prep. Cutting/chopping. Nope, unless you count things like my food processor.
- Smarter light control. Eh. A few dimmers work pretty well.
- General dusting, bathroom cleaning, etc. Nope.
- Laundry. Nope (other than my dumb washer & dryer).
- Lawn cutting, general yard maintenance. Nope.
- Water plants. One can setup complicated systems but you still need to get water from a water source to individual pots without leaks.
The list goes on. The bottom line is that the tasks I'd like to eliminate or streamline are largely not things that I can buy devices to help with.
I've been daydreaming of an automatic dish cabinet that takes in dirty dishes individually into a queue, cleans them, and places them in a cabinet such that a human could open it and pull out a dish by hand. It'd come with a specific set of dishes that had dedicated spots in the cabinet, and the washer section would have an individualized routine for each dish type to reduce water waste and ensure all surfaces are cleaned. I foresee commercial uses first, as it's size and shape would probably require a change in how kitchens are laid out in most homes.
General cleaning is an amazingly hard to define problem. I think "general food chopping" might be within reach, if computer vision lives up to the AI promises. I'm thinking of a breadbin or printer-sized object into which you place (e.g.) an onion, a carrot, and a turnip, close the safety interlock, and come back in a couple of minutes to diced onion, carrot batons, and cubes of turnip. Empty the waste container and possibly change out the knife and it's ready for re-use.
(The classic problem with kitchen labour-saving is devices that take longer to clean than the effort they save. Dishwashers help a lot, but your device has to be dishwashable.)
> - Water plants. One can setup complicated systems but you still need to get water from a water source to individual pots without leaks.
The programmable hose timers are very easy to use. They are essentially a "programmable thermostat that's really pretty effective" that controls the flow of water. In order to move water somewhere without leaks I use hoses without holes and hand tighten any connections.
Remember the good old days when software was designed from the assumption that Internet wouldn't be available, and then if it happened to be, it would do some other interesting things? I get that these are connected "smart" devices, but is it that difficult to tell the NEST thermostat that when the service is unavailable to simply keep running whatever settings were last used and just wait for it to come back? I cannot imagine sitting through a features meeting where we decided if our support smart thermostat has no internet connection, it just shuts everything the hell off.
My beefs with smart devices are numerous, but I think their most offensive component is software that seems to have been all designed by the same kind of moron.
"My Nest thermostat, which after some early teething problems I’ve come to like, falls flat on its face when my broadband connection goes down."
The implication here is that like the other thermostat mentioned, it doesn't work. That's simply not true, the Nest still works albeit only from the device itself like a traditional thermostat.
There have to be open protocols and control needs to happen locally (as in: on the home network). The good news is, you can absolutely have that, today. The bad news is, it's not as easy to set up as a Nest. People have to understand this tradeoff.
The thing to realize is that outside of very simple cases like connecting your Echo to your lighting, the smart home is a high-end product. If you can't afford a custom installation and hands-on support, you're not a real customer of the smart home. That means, for the 97%, it isn't a usable product.
People who can afford it can get a well-integrated smart home that works and continues to work and isn't spying on them (to the extent that anyone with a home security system isn't being spied on). Just don't try to do it yourself. Sure, some people can, but it's in the same category as home-built airplanes. For every one that flies, there are 500 sitting partially assembled in teh garage.
I have interesting tales from the trenches to tell. I used to work for a company that did home automation devices. This was quite a few years ago, when the whole craze was in its incipient stages, but I didn't lose contact with it.
I could fill a small book with reasons why IoT products are so bad, but the top reasons would have to be:
1. There is an intense pressure of delivering simply because everyone thinks the market is ripe for the taking and being first offers some kind of guarantee of winning it. Truth is, there is a very significant overlap between people who are interested in this whole IoT crap and people who involved in its development. Most products are so embarrassingly bad that no one in their right mind would want them.
2. Products could be better, but most of them are...
2a) ...developed without any kind of vision, because the management and product design teams don't really understand these things. The vision behind developing most smart home appliances is "we'll make a <insert company's top selling appliance here>, BUT ONLINE".
2b) ...developed by bad engineering teams, because projects are perceived to be too high-risk to be worth investing much into, so they're outsourced somewhere cheap (before you start yelling racism at me, please realize I was one of the cheap guys these were being outsourced to.)
2c) ...seen as little more than platforms for service and/or ads delivery. They see little investment, because management teams completely unfamiliar with hardware design believe the vehicle through which services and/or ads are delivered is pretty much irrelevant and/or can be easily fixed. They treat hardware platforms for delivering ads and services much like they treat web platforms, because that's all they ever built.
3. Standardization in this field is... exaggerated, at best. Even platforms that standardize things at the application layer (e.g. Z-Wave) routinely get it wrong. 90% of the "ground-breaking" gadgets that "open up the exciting world of <whatever> to everyone" only work with five or six phones, at best.
4. The main challenge of every marketing department in this field is coming up with reasons why someone would buy these things. Oftentimes that's done ad-hoc: a device already exists because someone with C in its title had a "strategic vision" and the device is already in beta, and now someone has to figure out how to sell it because the money have already been spent.
5. A lot of big names are in this game pro-actively, in case it actually turns out to be of some value. This is why you see big companies that should know better demoing embarrassing things (like LG's drunken robot). They need to be sure they have a foot in the door in case this actually takes off, but aren't willing to invest the funds needed to provide a serious, integrated system.
6. Testing is virtually non-existent and safety standards are embarrassingly lax. Half of the things that plug into a socket and do fancy Internet things are fire hazards.
7. Virtually every device that does fancy Internet things is a privacy and security hazard. Companies either lack management and development teams that realize how important these things are and know how to build them, or are actively disinterested in fixing them because it's detrimental to their business model.
The true "smart home" won't come until all these funky devices will be integrated in a single system. With everyone competing and raising walled gardens because they don't want to share profits from ads, that won't happen until a big enough player decides to invest the huge amount of money that's needed to create a comprehensive line of devices, that can cover everything from thermostats to sound system.
Until that happens, "smart" homes will be so incessantly dumb and annoying that no one who isn't paid to say they're awesome or build "smart" devices will want one.
Found this one particularly salient: 5. A lot of big names are in this game pro-actively, in case it actually turns out to be of some value. This is why you see big companies that should know better demoing embarrassing things (like LG's drunken robot). They need to be sure they have a foot in the door in case this actually takes off, but aren't willing to invest the funds needed to provide a serious, integrated system.
Many big companies are hedging their bets and playing catch up, which is downright dangerous when you're selling devices that scale up the threat vector for life-critical devices such as refrigerators, security cameras, door locks, thermostats, and cars.
I think Apple has the best shot at winning the connected home game due to their ownership of the iPhone ecosystem (used as a remote for the smarthome), tight product control, and their new marketing story of we are security - and they actually do implement the most rigorous key management and cryptography standards in the industry. I'm looking forward to their next hardware reveal - I think a Siri-integrated router (ala Amazon Echo) would complement their portfolio really well at the moment.
Most of these home automation solutions seem like a step backwards. Manually flipping a switch is fast and usually convenient. Pulling out my phone, unlocking it, toggling a widget or god forbid launching an app waiting for it to connect and send its command sucks. I looked into getting a Clapper as a happy compromise. It turns out they didn't care about safety either. Clappers had a tendency to start fires.
Keep in mind that in the 1990's it was rare for Windows uptime to exceed 24hrs and Microsoft demos of new features barely worked if at all. Not to mention that "security" was not yet on the PR agenda.
Gates' home, replete with low quality software a la Microsoft, sounded silly if not scary back then. But what do I know? Maybe it was all very stable and reliable.
IMO, part of this is the current "simple" systems-design that's been happening everywhere. Instead of giving users good defaults, with the ability to override almost any setting, we've designed things so it's "manufacturers choice, or none at all". This used to be just web-pages, and then it started leaking to browsers, then phones, etc.
There are a lot of other issues (security, phoning home, etc), but a lot of these wouldn't be as noticeable if they didn't follow the "simple" design.
Do not automate your home itself, but let an autonomous robot automate it for you. That way you have a hardware "fallback" that is robust, cannot be hacked externally and can be adjusted manually. Think of R2D2 moving around the house and taking care of adjusting the lights and temperature and stuff. Additionally the robot can be equipped with sensors and such. Beware: the robot should not be controllable via WLAN!
This is a software problem at its root. It seems software of all kinds is struggling to keep up with the exponential gains in hardware. CPUs are cheaper and smaller with more cores than ever before. But there is no Moore's law of software engineering. Software quality is a more abstract metric than number of transistors on a die.
[+] [-] officialchicken|10 years ago|reply
If it were really smart, I'd have a toilet and shower that uses 1/4 of the amount water, my gas stove would not have a pilot light, and "dumb" motion sensors for light have been around quite a while - but not ubiquitous (more common the EU).
Commercial buildings have had computers driving heating and cooling systems for a couple of decades (without thermostats but with temp sensors) so you don't need internet for that either. And I've never seen a house with VAV's installed in the ducts to actively heat/cool only the occupied portions of the home. And the easiest of all before construction - just "rotate" the foundation towards the sun to take better advantage of passive heating and cooling, that's an easy 15% energy bill savings.
[+] [-] mschuster91|10 years ago|reply
A gas water heater usually has an always on pilot light to avoid leaking unburned gas in case the main valve is stuck-open (or not fully closed). It's a failsafe, not a bug. (Which is why many heating systems refuse to turn back on automatically if they detect the pilot light goes off)
> Commercial buildings have had computers driving heating and cooling systems for a couple of decades
And they're expensive as fuck, and even today companies manage to mess up their setup (Berlin Airport cough).
[+] [-] prawn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jahnu|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Malic|10 years ago|reply
We will have to endure the Internet of Stupid Things first, sigh.
[+] [-] petra|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kelvin0|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monitron|10 years ago|reply
This is not to say that Nest doesn't have problems, but there's no way I'd have allowed it in my home if an Internet outage meant freezing my family.
[+] [-] zippergz|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmspring|10 years ago|reply
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/fashion/nest-thermostat-gl...
[+] [-] rietta|10 years ago|reply
Personally, I enjoy setting my house up "like a data center". But that is far beyond most home owners' abilities or desires for their network.
[+] [-] edent|10 years ago|reply
Firstly, how do you get your phone/server to talk to the IoT network? Some devices - like the Lifx - expect you to be in the same IP range in order to work properly.
Secondly, some IoT devices are wired into the network - specifically smart plugs which use powerline networking, and some HVAC stuff like Tado.
It's not an insurmountable problem, but requires careful configuration and accepting some loss of functionality.
[+] [-] Klathmon|10 years ago|reply
Think z-wave and friends. Then have an interchangeable controller which can be firewalled to all hell if you want and can run locally if you want as well.
[+] [-] Pxtl|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CaptSpify|10 years ago|reply
It's ridiculous that I've had to do this
[+] [-] riffraff|10 years ago|reply
Great to see we are fixing the gap by going in the opposite direction :)
[+] [-] upofadown|10 years ago|reply
I have a mercury thermostat upstairs set to my normal indoor temperature. It is connected across the heat demand leads through a software controlled switch. So no matter what the software does, the house can not get too hot or two cold. This means that I only have two set temperatures, but in practice that is enough. Setback occurs whenever the system detects that the alarm is set or when I set it before I go to bed.
The alarm panel is a traditional system in a box with a separate backup battery. It tells the automation when it is armed. It can be disarmed from the automation with a code, which the automation has to generate as a hash from an electronic key.
[+] [-] bitwarrior|10 years ago|reply
Fundamentally, I just want my TV to be a display - an amazing display. I don't even want or need it to have those shitty speakers TVs necessarily have - I already have a fantastic sound system. I want as close to 100% of my money going into the quality of the picture, not huge feature lists I have no need for.
[+] [-] spyder|10 years ago|reply
http://www.newegg.com/Large-Format-Displays/SubCategory/ID-6...
or just big monitors:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_hi_eb?rh=n%3A172282%2Cn%3A541...
[+] [-] gthtjtkt|10 years ago|reply
Every TV comes with enough bloatware to bring Watson to its knees. And the ones that manage to display a picture quickly despite that all extra processing start at $1,500, which is twice the price you would've paid 10 years ago.
[+] [-] snowwrestler|10 years ago|reply
These can be purchased individually, but unfortunately they tend to be more expensive than a "smart" TV.
[+] [-] BrianEatWorld|10 years ago|reply
I was given advice when shopping for a new screen to find the highest model range, as in the highest leading numbers, and then get the lowest number within that range as that usually trims out the "features". However, looking at LG's range of OLEDs, everything comes with "features", even the lowest model in the highest model range.
[+] [-] petra|10 years ago|reply
And TV's are just a case in point.
[+] [-] Loic|10 years ago|reply
[0]: http://knx.org/
[1]: http://www.openhab.org/
[+] [-] ghaff|10 years ago|reply
- Heat control. OK but I have a non-network connected programmable thermostat that's really pretty effective.
- Vacuuming. OK. Roombas are a start in this direction although how effective they are depends a lot on your house layout.
- Clean up dirty dishes, wipe down counters, etc. Nope, unless you count my dishwasher.
- General food prep. Cutting/chopping. Nope, unless you count things like my food processor.
- Smarter light control. Eh. A few dimmers work pretty well.
- General dusting, bathroom cleaning, etc. Nope.
- Laundry. Nope (other than my dumb washer & dryer).
- Lawn cutting, general yard maintenance. Nope.
- Water plants. One can setup complicated systems but you still need to get water from a water source to individual pots without leaks.
The list goes on. The bottom line is that the tasks I'd like to eliminate or streamline are largely not things that I can buy devices to help with.
[+] [-] goda90|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|10 years ago|reply
(The classic problem with kitchen labour-saving is devices that take longer to clean than the effort they save. Dishwashers help a lot, but your device has to be dishwashable.)
[+] [-] gherkin0|10 years ago|reply
A dishwasher is a very specialized robot. I think it counts as home automation.
> Lawn cutting, general yard maintenance. Nope.
That's wrong. Robot lawnmowers exist, and they're made by several different companies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_lawn_mower
[+] [-] dfc|10 years ago|reply
The programmable hose timers are very easy to use. They are essentially a "programmable thermostat that's really pretty effective" that controls the flow of water. In order to move water somewhere without leaks I use hoses without holes and hand tighten any connections.
[+] [-] FussyZeus|10 years ago|reply
My beefs with smart devices are numerous, but I think their most offensive component is software that seems to have been all designed by the same kind of moron.
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cptskippy|10 years ago|reply
The implication here is that like the other thermostat mentioned, it doesn't work. That's simply not true, the Nest still works albeit only from the device itself like a traditional thermostat.
[+] [-] Udo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] talles|10 years ago|reply
I usually see industry tendencies (such as "big data" or "machine learning") skeptically, but this one I'm just plain pessimistic. I hope I'm wrong.
[+] [-] Zigurd|10 years ago|reply
People who can afford it can get a well-integrated smart home that works and continues to work and isn't spying on them (to the extent that anyone with a home security system isn't being spied on). Just don't try to do it yourself. Sure, some people can, but it's in the same category as home-built airplanes. For every one that flies, there are 500 sitting partially assembled in teh garage.
[+] [-] notalaser|10 years ago|reply
I could fill a small book with reasons why IoT products are so bad, but the top reasons would have to be:
1. There is an intense pressure of delivering simply because everyone thinks the market is ripe for the taking and being first offers some kind of guarantee of winning it. Truth is, there is a very significant overlap between people who are interested in this whole IoT crap and people who involved in its development. Most products are so embarrassingly bad that no one in their right mind would want them.
2. Products could be better, but most of them are...
2a) ...developed without any kind of vision, because the management and product design teams don't really understand these things. The vision behind developing most smart home appliances is "we'll make a <insert company's top selling appliance here>, BUT ONLINE".
2b) ...developed by bad engineering teams, because projects are perceived to be too high-risk to be worth investing much into, so they're outsourced somewhere cheap (before you start yelling racism at me, please realize I was one of the cheap guys these were being outsourced to.)
2c) ...seen as little more than platforms for service and/or ads delivery. They see little investment, because management teams completely unfamiliar with hardware design believe the vehicle through which services and/or ads are delivered is pretty much irrelevant and/or can be easily fixed. They treat hardware platforms for delivering ads and services much like they treat web platforms, because that's all they ever built.
3. Standardization in this field is... exaggerated, at best. Even platforms that standardize things at the application layer (e.g. Z-Wave) routinely get it wrong. 90% of the "ground-breaking" gadgets that "open up the exciting world of <whatever> to everyone" only work with five or six phones, at best.
4. The main challenge of every marketing department in this field is coming up with reasons why someone would buy these things. Oftentimes that's done ad-hoc: a device already exists because someone with C in its title had a "strategic vision" and the device is already in beta, and now someone has to figure out how to sell it because the money have already been spent.
5. A lot of big names are in this game pro-actively, in case it actually turns out to be of some value. This is why you see big companies that should know better demoing embarrassing things (like LG's drunken robot). They need to be sure they have a foot in the door in case this actually takes off, but aren't willing to invest the funds needed to provide a serious, integrated system.
6. Testing is virtually non-existent and safety standards are embarrassingly lax. Half of the things that plug into a socket and do fancy Internet things are fire hazards.
7. Virtually every device that does fancy Internet things is a privacy and security hazard. Companies either lack management and development teams that realize how important these things are and know how to build them, or are actively disinterested in fixing them because it's detrimental to their business model.
The true "smart home" won't come until all these funky devices will be integrated in a single system. With everyone competing and raising walled gardens because they don't want to share profits from ads, that won't happen until a big enough player decides to invest the huge amount of money that's needed to create a comprehensive line of devices, that can cover everything from thermostats to sound system.
Until that happens, "smart" homes will be so incessantly dumb and annoying that no one who isn't paid to say they're awesome or build "smart" devices will want one.
[+] [-] roymurdock|10 years ago|reply
Found this one particularly salient: 5. A lot of big names are in this game pro-actively, in case it actually turns out to be of some value. This is why you see big companies that should know better demoing embarrassing things (like LG's drunken robot). They need to be sure they have a foot in the door in case this actually takes off, but aren't willing to invest the funds needed to provide a serious, integrated system.
Many big companies are hedging their bets and playing catch up, which is downright dangerous when you're selling devices that scale up the threat vector for life-critical devices such as refrigerators, security cameras, door locks, thermostats, and cars.
I think Apple has the best shot at winning the connected home game due to their ownership of the iPhone ecosystem (used as a remote for the smarthome), tight product control, and their new marketing story of we are security - and they actually do implement the most rigorous key management and cryptography standards in the industry. I'm looking forward to their next hardware reveal - I think a Siri-integrated router (ala Amazon Echo) would complement their portfolio really well at the moment.
[+] [-] raisedbyninjas|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chflags|10 years ago|reply
Keep in mind that in the 1990's it was rare for Windows uptime to exceed 24hrs and Microsoft demos of new features barely worked if at all. Not to mention that "security" was not yet on the PR agenda.
Gates' home, replete with low quality software a la Microsoft, sounded silly if not scary back then. But what do I know? Maybe it was all very stable and reliable.
[+] [-] CaptSpify|10 years ago|reply
There are a lot of other issues (security, phoning home, etc), but a lot of these wouldn't be as noticeable if they didn't follow the "simple" design.
[+] [-] kluck|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kbart|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reedlaw|10 years ago|reply