> The Hue Bridge is not just a Wi-Fi to Zigbee translator. It has never been. It’s also the local intelligence of the system. It coordinates that your switches

> The Hue Bridge is not just a Wi-Fi to Zigbee translator. It has never been. It’s also the local intelligence of the system. It coordinates that your switches work well with the lights, it is what makes sure that the network is well managed. Entertainment streams, cloud services, automations, schedules … all that and more is managed by the bridge. Such a small, reliable “edge computer“ in the home is essential. matter does not offer a solution for it. Building all the functionalities directly into lamps would make things much more complicated, and we don’t want to move them to the cloud. That is, even if we used Thread, we would still need a bridge. Second: Mesh networking with Zigbee in an efficient and reliable way is really hard. We have been working on getting that to work well for a decade. And Thread at scale in the complexity of users homes is not yet proven. I’m a bit afraid of how open Thread will be. There will be many, many companies with many different implementations in the same network. So, I see a lot of risk, and we don’t have plans to build Thread light bulbs. I don’t say never, but we have very much a “wait and see“ approach towards it. Last not least: We have a very happy and large installed base. A key benefit of Philips Hue is future-proof and always up to date. Many people have made large investments in a Hue system as part of their home infrastructure, not as a gadget. And they expect that these products remain relevant for at least ten years. So far, we have never asked consumers to buy new lights.