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there are actually tons of companies in this space already making money (e.g., wyze), but it’s highly fragmented and none have a unified vision or product strat

there are actually tons of companies in this space already making money (e.g., wyze), but it’s highly fragmented and none have a unified vision or product strategy yet. so yes, they’re vulnerable to the behemoths right now, but those dynamics aren’t locked in yet. it’s mostly tough because of the high upfront capital costs (manufacturing, r&d, and marketing). people still talk fondly about discontinued apple routers and what nest could have been as an independent venture, for example.

mikepurvis 6y ago
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the pitch from the GP, but Wyze seems like it's pretty clearly a hardware + cloud services play, similar to most other IOT ecosystems except maybe Hue. The (optional) monthly cost paid there is for loosened restrictions on an already existing works-anywhere setup— it's an upsell for power users, not a cost of entry. This seems a lot easier to me than on-prem cloud services, either in BYOH form ("but it's just software") or as a packaged appliance ("another hub to install, really?"). I would say that the closest thing to this right now for paid is coming from the storage side— NAS providers like Synology using hardware sales to support a limited ecosystem of "one click" deployable apps. And for free, it's ecosystems like HomeAssistant, which a lot of people just deploy as a fire-and-forget RPi image, but as expected with a free ecosystem, as soon as you get off the ultra-common use cases, you're reading source code to figure out how it works, and wading through a tangle of unmaintained "community" plugins that only do half of what you want.
- clairity 6y ago
  the primary value-add is one layer higher than a NAS, a standalone router, or homeassistant but would likely be built on those kinds of things. it's providing a range of hardware devices that can work seemlessly together in a way that you don't have to muck around with config files or programming and yet have it all be secure and private by default. the value is in an ecosystem of safe appliances that require little technical knowledge. home audio/theater from prior to the internet revolution might be a good analogy: a bunch of separate boxes that each provide tailored functionality but all work together seemlessly without a lot of technical knowledge. that, but for all sorts of computing devices.
elliekelly 6y ago
> there are actually tons of companies in this space already making money (e.g., wyze), but it’s highly fragmented and none have a unified vision or product strategy yet. so yes, they’re vulnerable to the behemoths right now, but those dynamics aren’t locked in yet. I also think it's still a little too nerd-focused for the average consumer. I'd say I know far more about security, networking and hardware than the average consumer but, compared to the HN crowd, I know next to nothing. I struggle to use a lot of the current solutions because they get bogged down in doing cool technical stuff that is so far outside the scope of the average potential user's wants/needs or the DIY solution will be "easy"... for someone with an extensive CS background and years of experience.
- clairity 6y ago
  i think you need to go up a level of abstraction from this perspective to see the utility for the average consumer. we each have computers all around us, phones, tablets, tv's, and increasingly everything else. it's so hopeless to manage, much less understand, these mysterious machines for more and more people. what you want is a company you can trust to manage these things for you but gives you the ultimate, yet cognitively bounded, control over them. for instance, plug in a smart device and have confidence that it's not doing surreptitious things behind your back, because it's automatically segregated into its own vlan and given only enough network access to be controlled by you without needing to know much about the underlying technologies involved.
  - mikepurvis 6y ago
    "a company you can trust to manage these things for you" "automatically segregated into its own vlan" Aren't these goals fundamentally at odds? I would imagine that Joe consumer (if they care at all about any of this) would be rather more inclined to entrust the role of orchestrating/segregating their home network devices to an entity like Google than to some random startup.
    - clairity 6y ago
      the average person doesn't even know what these things are, which is partially why there is a market opportunity here. what they know is that companies like google and facebook are not entirely trustworthy but they have no alternative. it's hopelss, until an entity comes along and gives them some hope in the form of an alternative. basically all of the things we talk about around preserving privacy and security on the internet need to be built into our devices, and companies like google actively oppose such limitations of their reach into our lives.

mikepurvis 6y ago

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the pitch from the GP, but Wyze seems like it's pretty clearly a hardware + cloud services play, similar to most other IOT ecosystems except maybe Hue. The (optional) monthly cost paid there is for loosened restrictions on an already existing works-anywhere setup— it's an upsell for power users, not a cost of entry. This seems a lot easier to me than on-prem cloud services, either in BYOH form ("but it's just software") or as a packaged appliance ("another hub to install, really?"). I would say that the closest thing to this right now for paid is coming from the storage side— NAS providers like Synology using hardware sales to support a limited ecosystem of "one click" deployable apps. And for free, it's ecosystems like HomeAssistant, which a lot of people just deploy as a fire-and-forget RPi image, but as expected with a free ecosystem, as soon as you get off the ultra-common use cases, you're reading source code to figure out how it works, and wading through a tangle of unmaintained "community" plugins that only do half of what you want.

clairity 6y ago
the primary value-add is one layer higher than a NAS, a standalone router, or homeassistant but would likely be built on those kinds of things. it's providing a range of hardware devices that can work seemlessly together in a way that you don't have to muck around with config files or programming and yet have it all be secure and private by default. the value is in an ecosystem of safe appliances that require little technical knowledge. home audio/theater from prior to the internet revolution might be a good analogy: a bunch of separate boxes that each provide tailored functionality but all work together seemlessly without a lot of technical knowledge. that, but for all sorts of computing devices.

elliekelly 6y ago

> there are actually tons of companies in this space already making money (e.g., wyze), but it’s highly fragmented and none have a unified vision or product strategy yet. so yes, they’re vulnerable to the behemoths right now, but those dynamics aren’t locked in yet. I also think it's still a little too nerd-focused for the average consumer. I'd say I know far more about security, networking and hardware than the average consumer but, compared to the HN crowd, I know next to nothing. I struggle to use a lot of the current solutions because they get bogged down in doing cool technical stuff that is so far outside the scope of the average potential user's wants/needs or the DIY solution will be "easy"... for someone with an extensive CS background and years of experience.

clairity 6y ago
i think you need to go up a level of abstraction from this perspective to see the utility for the average consumer. we each have computers all around us, phones, tablets, tv's, and increasingly everything else. it's so hopeless to manage, much less understand, these mysterious machines for more and more people. what you want is a company you can trust to manage these things for you but gives you the ultimate, yet cognitively bounded, control over them. for instance, plug in a smart device and have confidence that it's not doing surreptitious things behind your back, because it's automatically segregated into its own vlan and given only enough network access to be controlled by you without needing to know much about the underlying technologies involved.
- mikepurvis 6y ago
  "a company you can trust to manage these things for you" "automatically segregated into its own vlan" Aren't these goals fundamentally at odds? I would imagine that Joe consumer (if they care at all about any of this) would be rather more inclined to entrust the role of orchestrating/segregating their home network devices to an entity like Google than to some random startup.
  - clairity 6y ago
    the average person doesn't even know what these things are, which is partially why there is a market opportunity here. what they know is that companies like google and facebook are not entirely trustworthy but they have no alternative. it's hopelss, until an entity comes along and gives them some hope in the form of an alternative. basically all of the things we talk about around preserving privacy and security on the internet need to be built into our devices, and companies like google actively oppose such limitations of their reach into our lives.