6 ms·

No one is willing to give up control. Unlike the PC era where the computer was the user's, all these systems are part of various walled gardens. Really excellen

No one is willing to give up control. Unlike the PC era where the computer was the user's, all these systems are part of various walled gardens. Really excellent loved cared for neat experiences just don't happen in corporate isolation, or they become mismanaged over time. Even if a corporation does do good for some folks, who they target wont match what other consumers want. The whole IoT era is plagued by draconian old-world corporate power-control games, which are unrefined crudity compared to where PCs had been headed. Some healthy standards & protocols that actually leave users in power would start to cleanup the toxic waste dump operating-regime these products are in now.

bruckie 3y ago
I'm hopeful that Matter will be one of those "healthy standards". It's local-first (no cloud connection required) and enables interop between lots of different devices (no more "made for Alexa" or "works with Google home"). It's unclear to me, though, how pervasively it will be adopted. The incentives in the IoT ecosystem are really hard to align in a way that creates great experiences for customers. (I work tangentially on IoT at Google, but speak for myself.)
- waboremo 3y ago
  Adoption seems much better than expected considering most major brands already have a bunch of devices that support it, and it hasn't been that long since spec v1 came out. Plus there's still a whole slew of device categories not yet supported until spec v2.
saberworks 3y ago
> No one is willing to give up control. Agreed. I recently moved into a new house. The builder put in a "clare smart home system." This included a clare home display mounted in the hallway with an inward facing camera. This device is exclusively controlled by security/smart home companies that contract with clare. I have no option to disable the camera, disable the phoning home, etc. In fact, before I can do anything meaningful on the device, they required an in-home appointment where they would set up every smart device in the house for "free," but future additions would require a paid service call for them to come out and set them up. I had emailed them asking about whether there was an alarm system, and before I got any reply I found an option on the display to activate the alarm. Which I did. But before it actually activated (it gave some sort of countdown), I pressed Cancel. It prompted me for a PIN, which I could only get from the installers. I had no option to cancel the alarm other than to cut power to the device, but once I pulled it off the wall it started wailing a tamper alarm that wouldn't stop until I pulled the backup battery. Oh and I found out later that it was snapping photos of me against my will and without my permission. Please note this all happened before the in-home appointment (which never happened). I canceled the appointment, permanently tore the thing off the wall, and it's destined for a landfill because the only way to get it to work is to activate it through that alarm company. Oh and they won't even return my calls/emails after I canceled the appointment. I tried calling them to see if they wanted it so they could use it as a warranty replacement or something, instead of putting it in the garbage. Every "smart" thing they put in this house sucks. The Ring doorbell doesn't function as a doorbell if it loses wifi connection. Oh and when it's connected, the initial press does ring the doorbell, but subsequent presses don't ring the doorbell, and this is by design. During the brief time I had it connected, I was getting constant alerts of suspicious people in my neighborhood, with attached photos of black people walking on a sidewalk. what!? It turns out it didn't recognize my address so connected me to some default place in Texas (I live in Washington!). There was no way to manually select a location, so I guess I was going to get false, racist alerts until such time as Ring decided to recognize my address. I reset it and canceled my Ring account. I'm going to replace it with a normal door bell button. This is getting thrown in the garbage as well. The "smart" z-wave switches haven't been connected/activated so should function as normal switches right? Nope, they do this stupid dim/undim thing and periodically completely fail to work until I turn off/on the circuit breaker. Another 5 items destined for a landfill to be replaced by regular switches. The smart front door lock (keypad) and smart garage door openers have never been connected to anything and I'm going to leave them that way. I really wish there was a hardware kill switch that would disable all wireless connections and leave them in a dumb mode. I'm worried someone else can come in and connect their phone or something, since I've never set them up. (in case anyone wants a free clare home panel, PM me an address to mail it to and I'll send it; rather have someone tinker with or hack it than trash it)
- nunez 3y ago
  > The Ring doorbell doesn't function as a doorbell if it loses wifi connection. Oh and when it's connected, the initial press does ring the doorbell, but subsequent presses don't ring the doorbell, and this is by design. During the brief time I had it connected The Ring doorbell absolutely works as a mechanical doorbell if it's hard-wired into the doorbell system in the house...if there is one. Other than that, totally agree with you re: built-in "smart home" systems. They are cheap systems builders use to drive the home price up that you don't have much control over. If we build our own house, I'll ask for non-smart devices but replace them with my own. I LOVE our smart home stuff.
  - saberworks 3y ago
    > The Ring doorbell absolutely works as a mechanical doorbell if it's hard-wired into the doorbell system in the house...if there is one. When the ring doorbell lost wifi, because we changed ISPs, it no longer functioned as a doorbell. When pressed, it would only make the chime outside at the button, it would not ring inside the house. Yes it's hard wired to a doorbell inside the house. When connected to wifi and active, when the ring doorbell button is pressed, it will ring inside the house one single time. Then it starts recording, by default for 2 minutes. During the time it's recording, if the button is pressed again, the button press is completely ignored. So by default you can ring the doorbell 1 time every 2 minutes -- anything more often gets ignored. There is a huge bug report / thread about this on ring's site and they just say it's by design. When the ring doorbell is completely disconnected from wifi and reset back to factory settings, it indeed functions as a regular doorbell. But it also has a spinning light that notifies everybody that it's not set up and is not recording. My brother in law works for a home builder that installs Ring doorbell buttons by default on all their homes. He said he noticed that about half of them get replaced with a regular doorbell button or a different "smart/camera" doorbell within a few weeks of initial move-in.
    - nunez 3y ago
      Very interesting. I didn't know it was this nuanced. Thanks for breaking it down!
whitemary 3y ago
> Some healthy standards & protocols that actually leave users in power would start to cleanup the toxic waste dump operating-regime these products are in now. Like many vague complaints ostensibly concerning technology, this is a political issue and the solutions will remain fleeting and/or unidentified until the issue is acknowledged and discussed as such.
AwaAwa 3y ago
As long as subscriptions are the 'future' this will never happen. Thus only onerous home brewed bolt together solutions are really available to the consumer. The extremely rich, or hospitality corps have the benefit of hiring a specialist MSP for all of this, that can wrestle all the disparate pieces together, with the financial muscle to get what support they need from their OEMs.
korse 3y ago
I disagree. Replace 'smart home' with 'automated home' and then compare to the mature 'automated industry'. You can have a small basket of protocols, hardware vendors and strategies which all do roughly the same thing. You pick a set which meets your budget and complexity requirements, install, tune and go. You've got some baseline 'standards' for control voltages, sensor types etc. and some real STANDARDS for safety, wiring and so on but everyone still has their proprietary sauce and attempts to keep people in their ecosystem. It makes money and gets things done anyway. You know what makes industrial automation a pain in the ass in mid-sized businesses? People wanting the benefits of automation without the burden of fully quantifying the process to be automated. This is the problem with 'automation' in the home. You need someone who can quantify the 'home process' and figure out what routines can be delegated to the automation in order to provide a tangible benefit. Some changes may need to made to human behavior for the automation to be beneficial. Which changes are acceptable, which not etc. This is hard enough to do in industry and expecting it in every home seems... optimistic. Until this gets sorted out, I don't expect to see anything other than the continuation of the 1950's 'labor saving appliance' revolution coupled with invasive home entertainment systems and the next wave of 'clap on, clap off' lights.
- rektide 3y ago
  Yeah we are very differently aligned. To me, there's The Cluetrain Manifesto as gospel, preaching that giving people great capabilities & connectivity & letting us tinker & explore & meddle around unlocks all the interesting neat spaces & the invisible hand starts shuffling us towards optimal patterns, towards spaces which have been winning. "The street finds its own uses for thing", and exposing the things & making them flexible & malleable & observable, making them built on good open protocols accelerates the OODA spirals to each user finding their own great success greatly. By compare, I feel like you are preaching a delivered from on high careful slow growth, where every home needs weeks of consultants to come in & carefully outline the next 20 years of use cases & then carefully select & hardcode exacting picks for that home. Open source is already kicking ass. Home Assistant is the shit. We just need an ecosystem of devices that are even 1/2 as user-exposed as the software doing the driving is. We need to fuel what is possible with devices that are willing to meet us in finding out. Not more stodgy slow encumbered methodical processes.

bruckie 3y ago

I'm hopeful that Matter will be one of those "healthy standards". It's local-first (no cloud connection required) and enables interop between lots of different devices (no more "made for Alexa" or "works with Google home"). It's unclear to me, though, how pervasively it will be adopted. The incentives in the IoT ecosystem are really hard to align in a way that creates great experiences for customers. (I work tangentially on IoT at Google, but speak for myself.)

waboremo 3y ago
Adoption seems much better than expected considering most major brands already have a bunch of devices that support it, and it hasn't been that long since spec v1 came out. Plus there's still a whole slew of device categories not yet supported until spec v2.

saberworks 3y ago

> No one is willing to give up control. Agreed. I recently moved into a new house. The builder put in a "clare smart home system." This included a clare home display mounted in the hallway with an inward facing camera. This device is exclusively controlled by security/smart home companies that contract with clare. I have no option to disable the camera, disable the phoning home, etc. In fact, before I can do anything meaningful on the device, they required an in-home appointment where they would set up every smart device in the house for "free," but future additions would require a paid service call for them to come out and set them up. I had emailed them asking about whether there was an alarm system, and before I got any reply I found an option on the display to activate the alarm. Which I did. But before it actually activated (it gave some sort of countdown), I pressed Cancel. It prompted me for a PIN, which I could only get from the installers. I had no option to cancel the alarm other than to cut power to the device, but once I pulled it off the wall it started wailing a tamper alarm that wouldn't stop until I pulled the backup battery. Oh and I found out later that it was snapping photos of me against my will and without my permission. Please note this all happened before the in-home appointment (which never happened). I canceled the appointment, permanently tore the thing off the wall, and it's destined for a landfill because the only way to get it to work is to activate it through that alarm company. Oh and they won't even return my calls/emails after I canceled the appointment. I tried calling them to see if they wanted it so they could use it as a warranty replacement or something, instead of putting it in the garbage. Every "smart" thing they put in this house sucks. The Ring doorbell doesn't function as a doorbell if it loses wifi connection. Oh and when it's connected, the initial press does ring the doorbell, but subsequent presses don't ring the doorbell, and this is by design. During the brief time I had it connected, I was getting constant alerts of suspicious people in my neighborhood, with attached photos of black people walking on a sidewalk. what!? It turns out it didn't recognize my address so connected me to some default place in Texas (I live in Washington!). There was no way to manually select a location, so I guess I was going to get false, racist alerts until such time as Ring decided to recognize my address. I reset it and canceled my Ring account. I'm going to replace it with a normal door bell button. This is getting thrown in the garbage as well. The "smart" z-wave switches haven't been connected/activated so should function as normal switches right? Nope, they do this stupid dim/undim thing and periodically completely fail to work until I turn off/on the circuit breaker. Another 5 items destined for a landfill to be replaced by regular switches. The smart front door lock (keypad) and smart garage door openers have never been connected to anything and I'm going to leave them that way. I really wish there was a hardware kill switch that would disable all wireless connections and leave them in a dumb mode. I'm worried someone else can come in and connect their phone or something, since I've never set them up. (in case anyone wants a free clare home panel, PM me an address to mail it to and I'll send it; rather have someone tinker with or hack it than trash it)

nunez 3y ago
> The Ring doorbell doesn't function as a doorbell if it loses wifi connection. Oh and when it's connected, the initial press does ring the doorbell, but subsequent presses don't ring the doorbell, and this is by design. During the brief time I had it connected The Ring doorbell absolutely works as a mechanical doorbell if it's hard-wired into the doorbell system in the house...if there is one. Other than that, totally agree with you re: built-in "smart home" systems. They are cheap systems builders use to drive the home price up that you don't have much control over. If we build our own house, I'll ask for non-smart devices but replace them with my own. I LOVE our smart home stuff.
- saberworks 3y ago
  > The Ring doorbell absolutely works as a mechanical doorbell if it's hard-wired into the doorbell system in the house...if there is one. When the ring doorbell lost wifi, because we changed ISPs, it no longer functioned as a doorbell. When pressed, it would only make the chime outside at the button, it would not ring inside the house. Yes it's hard wired to a doorbell inside the house. When connected to wifi and active, when the ring doorbell button is pressed, it will ring inside the house one single time. Then it starts recording, by default for 2 minutes. During the time it's recording, if the button is pressed again, the button press is completely ignored. So by default you can ring the doorbell 1 time every 2 minutes -- anything more often gets ignored. There is a huge bug report / thread about this on ring's site and they just say it's by design. When the ring doorbell is completely disconnected from wifi and reset back to factory settings, it indeed functions as a regular doorbell. But it also has a spinning light that notifies everybody that it's not set up and is not recording. My brother in law works for a home builder that installs Ring doorbell buttons by default on all their homes. He said he noticed that about half of them get replaced with a regular doorbell button or a different "smart/camera" doorbell within a few weeks of initial move-in.
  - nunez 3y ago
    Very interesting. I didn't know it was this nuanced. Thanks for breaking it down!

whitemary 3y ago

> Some healthy standards & protocols that actually leave users in power would start to cleanup the toxic waste dump operating-regime these products are in now. Like many vague complaints ostensibly concerning technology, this is a political issue and the solutions will remain fleeting and/or unidentified until the issue is acknowledged and discussed as such.

AwaAwa 3y ago

As long as subscriptions are the 'future' this will never happen. Thus only onerous home brewed bolt together solutions are really available to the consumer. The extremely rich, or hospitality corps have the benefit of hiring a specialist MSP for all of this, that can wrestle all the disparate pieces together, with the financial muscle to get what support they need from their OEMs.

korse 3y ago

I disagree. Replace 'smart home' with 'automated home' and then compare to the mature 'automated industry'. You can have a small basket of protocols, hardware vendors and strategies which all do roughly the same thing. You pick a set which meets your budget and complexity requirements, install, tune and go. You've got some baseline 'standards' for control voltages, sensor types etc. and some real STANDARDS for safety, wiring and so on but everyone still has their proprietary sauce and attempts to keep people in their ecosystem. It makes money and gets things done anyway. You know what makes industrial automation a pain in the ass in mid-sized businesses? People wanting the benefits of automation without the burden of fully quantifying the process to be automated. This is the problem with 'automation' in the home. You need someone who can quantify the 'home process' and figure out what routines can be delegated to the automation in order to provide a tangible benefit. Some changes may need to made to human behavior for the automation to be beneficial. Which changes are acceptable, which not etc. This is hard enough to do in industry and expecting it in every home seems... optimistic. Until this gets sorted out, I don't expect to see anything other than the continuation of the 1950's 'labor saving appliance' revolution coupled with invasive home entertainment systems and the next wave of 'clap on, clap off' lights.

rektide 3y ago
Yeah we are very differently aligned. To me, there's The Cluetrain Manifesto as gospel, preaching that giving people great capabilities & connectivity & letting us tinker & explore & meddle around unlocks all the interesting neat spaces & the invisible hand starts shuffling us towards optimal patterns, towards spaces which have been winning. "The street finds its own uses for thing", and exposing the things & making them flexible & malleable & observable, making them built on good open protocols accelerates the OODA spirals to each user finding their own great success greatly. By compare, I feel like you are preaching a delivered from on high careful slow growth, where every home needs weeks of consultants to come in & carefully outline the next 20 years of use cases & then carefully select & hardcode exacting picks for that home. Open source is already kicking ass. Home Assistant is the shit. We just need an ecosystem of devices that are even 1/2 as user-exposed as the software doing the driving is. We need to fuel what is possible with devices that are willing to meet us in finding out. Not more stodgy slow encumbered methodical processes.