Not just disappointed. A car being in this same situation could be extremely dangerous to people riding in it, or just in the nearby area. Imagine if your aut

Not just disappointed. A car being in this same situation could be extremely dangerous to people riding in it, or just in the nearby area. Imagine if your autonomous car just stops midway along a motorway at 70mph, or in rush hour traffic, or in just about any other important situation. That's a situation that'd be pretty hard to avoid for a manufacturer, given all the timezones and places around the world that such a vehicle could be used. At least this device merely controls some devices inside a house, where it switching off is a simple inconvenience rather than a danger to life and limb. The solution to these problems is fairly simple, at least in theory. The 'smart' device simply loses any functionality dependent on the maker's network when services are shut down. Fewer people complain about a lot of Nintendo's games losing online functionality because there's a single player and various options that doesn't dependent on it. So if Mario Kart 8 or Luigi's Mansion 2 has its servers go offline, you've got a perfectly decent game which simply loses online multiplayer. In these cases, if the services goes away, it should simply become a normal device that the user configures themself independently of the company's network.