[pirateking]

I am getting a familiar sensation.

An unsettling feeling that Home Automation™ is not actually about making the home and its consumer electronics more integrated, easier to use, and providing more free time and control to the individual. Rather, it is about making things harder to use for the average consumer without machine or professional assistance, requiring more hardware bundles and software services to get the "total experience", and control and data slowly taken away from the individual. Of course, this play for command and control is for the innocent sake of predictable behavior that can be optimized (and the steady revenue and growth that implies).

Self optimizing systems' predilection to predictability is quite predictable (whether machine or human).

While I believe Nest and HomeKit will likely be successful due to these optimizations they can potentially bring, I consciously will take the less optimal route this time, and have fun DIY'ing my automation instead.