Let's see a couple of plausible use cases for a home router with a remote config capability: * Husband calls wife who is at work: "Joey is visiting for a day,

Let's see a couple of plausible use cases for a home router with a remote config capability: * Husband calls wife who is at work: "Joey is visiting for a day, but he says our network is locked. Can you let him on? I don't know how to use this thing." * Grandma calls her son the Dad who's away on a business trip: "I know you've blocked Facebook from your daughter's machine, but it's also blocked on my laptop. Can you unblock it for me? I'm trying to make plans!" Sure, one could try to walk someone through the steps over the phone, or even remote desktop into a box to make the changes... or just tell them "wait til I get home, too bad!". But theoretically, both of these scenarios could be fixed with a cloud oriented mgt system. Look, Cisco made a total clusterF out of how they handled this, but it's also easy to see what they were trying to solve for. They just hamhanded it, in a huge way. Also, these scenarios are potentially rare, so they made people change everything about the router just to solve these edge cases, agreed. But I suspect many more products will have cloud/external management before long, whether they should or not. When something is hot, it becomes solutions looking for problems beyond the few they may actually solve.