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Except when the business model was to sell the hardware at breakeven and make it up with the monthly subscription, and people are buying subsidized hardware and

by zaroth 9y ago

Except when the business model was to sell the hardware at breakeven and make it up with the monthly subscription, and people are buying subsidized hardware and skipping out on the subscription fees. If the company sets out to create an open platform and has a business model which works in that world, that is a beautiful thing. Is that the case here and are we seeing a virtuous cycle, are features contributed back to the company and actually integrated into their product? I think that’s a beautiful model but I’m not sure that’s actually what’s happenning here? Literally the first sentence of the article; “...its price is cheap but in exchange you are tied to the Xiaomi’s Mi Home App & Cloud.”

StavrosK 9y ago
Xiaomi is, in general, quite good about opening its products up. The YeeLight bulbs, for example, have a nice open API.
- metafex 9y ago
  Yeelight is just a startup marketing under the Xiaomi brand and is promoted by them, it's not technically Xiaomi. Same as with other branches of products (e.g. the vacuum robots). It also happens that Xiaomi later releases products which actually compete with their partners (in this case yeelight and their bedside lamps). Also the whole Yi Camera brand. First marketed with the help of Xiaomi and now a competitor to the Mijia brand (Xiaomis own brand). (Citations and more insight needed, that was just from memory).
scottlamb 9y ago
> Except when the business model was to sell the hardware at breakeven and make it up with the monthly subscription, and people are buying subsidized hardware and skipping out on the subscription fees. A couple other reasons: * They want to sell the same product at different prices in different regions. * They're concerned about copycat hardware vendors. Hikvision (and I think Dahua) seems to want to prevent people from modifying their firmware; as far as I can tell it's for these reasons. I really wish they would just open it up. I'd love to put open source firmware on a decent outdoor IP camera. The vendors' own firmware is pretty lacking. It's untrustworthy (proprietary software from a Chinese company; how sure are you it doesn't have backdoors?), written insecurely (probably out of negligence rather than intent but again who knows), buggy in general, has mediocre motion detection (not sure I could do better on their hardware but I'd love to try), and has mediocre H.264 encoding (likewise).

by zaroth 9y ago

StavrosK 9y ago

Xiaomi is, in general, quite good about opening its products up. The YeeLight bulbs, for example, have a nice open API.

metafex 9y ago
Yeelight is just a startup marketing under the Xiaomi brand and is promoted by them, it's not technically Xiaomi. Same as with other branches of products (e.g. the vacuum robots). It also happens that Xiaomi later releases products which actually compete with their partners (in this case yeelight and their bedside lamps). Also the whole Yi Camera brand. First marketed with the help of Xiaomi and now a competitor to the Mijia brand (Xiaomis own brand). (Citations and more insight needed, that was just from memory).

scottlamb 9y ago

> Except when the business model was to sell the hardware at breakeven and make it up with the monthly subscription, and people are buying subsidized hardware and skipping out on the subscription fees. A couple other reasons: * They want to sell the same product at different prices in different regions. * They're concerned about copycat hardware vendors. Hikvision (and I think Dahua) seems to want to prevent people from modifying their firmware; as far as I can tell it's for these reasons. I really wish they would just open it up. I'd love to put open source firmware on a decent outdoor IP camera. The vendors' own firmware is pretty lacking. It's untrustworthy (proprietary software from a Chinese company; how sure are you it doesn't have backdoors?), written insecurely (probably out of negligence rather than intent but again who knows), buggy in general, has mediocre motion detection (not sure I could do better on their hardware but I'd love to try), and has mediocre H.264 encoding (likewise).