Google's parent company is disabling old smart home devices

[IVB]

dumb question: Has anyone here ever seriously proposed moving automation to the cloud as opposed to adding an interaction model on top of their current structure?
 
Nobody here is silly enough to use SmartThings, so I don't see why this keeps coming up. 

 

[wkearney99]

Smart Things is actually pretty flexible.  Sure, there's cloud dependency but their framework for adding devices and programming features is pretty nice compared to a lot of other options.  Especially at their price point.  Spend more and, yes, you get more... but it's a LOT MORE.

 

[wkearney99]

I had this conversation with a friend who works for Microsoft.
We were discussing new technology like the Amazon Echo and I pointed out its fatal flaw is reliance on the cloud.
Something like that, for home automation uses,should not rely on the cloud to operate.
The cloud can enhance it but basic functionality should be local.
For instance onboard recording of the most used phrases.
Every day you might say "Turn on Kitchen Lights", there's no reason it needs to go to the cloud every day to process that phrase.

 
You side-step mentioning Microsoft's considerable efforts to use the Cloud (Azure services).  That and the near total dependency of the Xbox One consoles on an Internet connection.  Few (none?) games will operate effectively without a constant cloud connection. 
 
It's been decades with literally almost NO progress being made by offline automation controllers.  In the span of less than a year there's been an explosion of developments, much of which makes use of cloud-connected services.  No doubt as things settle out there will be an evolution of local and cloud hybrids.  
 
But please, don't paint some dire picture about the cloud being bad when local stuff has sucked ass for YEARS.

 

[wkearney99]

Don't know if anyone is using Revolv, but this article does give a chilling look into what can happen with a cloud based technology.

 
Let's be honest here.  A half-baked product made a Hail Mary play and got bought up it before it went belly up.  It should be no surprise to see the parent company cutting their losses and moving on.  Likewise, Revolv had, what, a few thousand implemented sites?  Yeah, it sucks their weak solution will stop working, but how many actually kept it running?  

 

[Dean Roddey]

It's been decades with literally almost NO progress being made by offline automation controllers.  In the span of less than a year there's been an explosion of developments, much of which makes use of cloud-connected services.  No doubt as things settle out there will be an evolution of local and cloud hybrids.  
 
But please, don't paint some dire picture about the cloud being bad when local stuff has sucked ass for YEARS.

 
I think that the vendors of those products would be surprised to find that they've done nothing all that time. What's happened in the last couple years is a lot of standalone doo-dads and partial solutions mostly, many of which have already gone down the tubes and a lot more of which will yet. 
 
None of this activity has actually made any progress towards a 'smart home'. It's mostly smart doo-dads because that's all that any of these companies can actually sell, since the actual problem of a smart home was and is still very hard (and that's what those, apparently sucky, other products are attempting to solve.) 

 

[picta]

None of this activity has actually made any progress towards a 'smart home'. It's mostly smart doo-dads because that's all that any of these companies can actually sell, since the actual problem of a smart home was and is still very hard (and that's what those, apparently sucky, other products are attempting to solve.) 

 
Very true

 

[Desert_AIP]

 
You side-step mentioning Microsoft's considerable efforts to use the Cloud (Azure services).  That and the near total dependency of the Xbox One consoles on an Internet connection.  Few (none?) games will operate effectively without a constant cloud connection. 
 
It's been decades with literally almost NO progress being made by offline automation controllers.  In the span of less than a year there's been an explosion of developments, much of which makes use of cloud-connected services.  No doubt as things settle out there will be an evolution of local and cloud hybrids.  
 
But please, don't paint some dire picture about the cloud being bad when local stuff has sucked ass for YEARS.

If you reread my post, I stated the cloud can enhance functionality, but common repetitive actions should not require it. That's a waste of bandwidth. The device will probably need to refer to the cloud the first few times it encounters a situation, phrase, set of circumstances, etc. But on day 500?

I am personally amazed at the voice recognition tech, using the cloud with billions of variants of words so it doesn't have to be trained to an individual's voice as in the past.

Microsoft has a team of people whose only job is to feed DVDs and music to Cortana. That blows my mind.

Perhaps I'm jaded because my broadband connection is not reliable enough for me to invest faith in it being there when I want it.

 

[Desert_AIP]

dumb question: Has anyone here ever seriously proposed moving automation to the cloud as opposed to adding an interaction model on top of their current structure?
 
 

IFTTT?

 

[JonW]

IFTTT?

 
IFTTT is another one of those companies that leaves me scared they'll disappear.  They provide their service for free and have no current method (that I'm aware of) to monetize what they're doing.  Either they have to monetize it at some point or they are bought by someone or they shut the doors.  Which one do you want to bet on?

 

[wkearney99]

IFTTT is already in trouble.  Their latest issue is trying to strongarm developers into changing their code to use a proprietary API and inserting some pretty problematic language into their terms of service (regarding rights to things well outside the scope of IFTTT integration).
 
If anything it's proving that providing a robust API is a necessary element for the vendors to provide themselves, such that any integration methodology can utilize it.  NOT just a single partner like IFTTT.  A lot of progress has been made on this front, quite a lot no doubt due to Echo integration.
 
Amazon's doing a lot of good things with regard to inexpensive SSL certificates, reliable AWS hosting, very clever developer features (like AWS Lambda) and phenomenal uptime. 

 

[IVB]

Is someone here really suggesting to use IFTTT for primary automation? I use it, but by no means do I rely on it. The latency is particularly crappy, typically nearly 10 seconds for something to occur. Thats fine for secondary stuff that I don't care about speed such as "save shazam starred songs to google drive" or "automatically download FB tagged pics to DropBox" but not actual home automation.

 

[wkearney99]

I think that the vendors of those products would be surprised to find that they've done nothing all that time. What's happened in the last couple years is a lot of standalone doo-dads and partial solutions mostly, many of which have already gone down the tubes and a lot more of which will yet. 
 
None of this activity has actually made any progress towards a 'smart home'. It's mostly smart doo-dads because that's all that any of these companies can actually sell, since the actual problem of a smart home was and is still very hard (and that's what those, apparently sucky, other products are attempting to solve.) 

 
The trouble has multiple fronts.  One, the existing vendors have done a piss-poor job of marketing what comprises a 'smart home'.  (This is a lot of the "nothing" I mention).  Two, the customers are cheap (and rightly so).  That doesn't leave a lot of room for revenue unless there's considerable sales volume.  
 
Utilizing a cloud services infrastructure at least takes the site visit costs out of the equation.  The less that's customized and on-site, the less expensive it's likely to be to install and maintain. That and server-side data presents a lot of opportunity for analysis.  This isn't without perils for privacy, no doubt.  But it opens possibilities for creating much more sophisticated heuristics, well beyond just simple rules seen thus far in HA.

 

[Dean Roddey]

The trouble has multiple fronts.  One, the existing vendors have done a piss-poor job of marketing what comprises a 'smart home'.  (This is a lot of the "nothing" I mention).  Two, the customers are cheap (and rightly so).  That doesn't leave a lot of room for revenue unless there's considerable sales volume.  

 
What would they have marketed? Buy before midnight tonight and it's only $20,000? There's no way to deliver an actually smart home for any price that would have attracted enough people (who were not of the sort who already knew they wanted some such thing) to justify the cost of the marketing.
 
They were never trying to sell to the 'cheap' customer, because (as you most obviously mention) what's the point? There's no money there, unless you are going for some sort of ad driven scheme or are trying to sell customer data for money or some such thing, which I don't think any of us would want. And that requires getting into a very high volume, low price world. And that world has fairly low barriers to entry these days, making it inevitable that it will ultimately become a complete commodity market, and of course STILL won't have done anything to create a really smart home because that's still not going to be doable for cheap and without considerable time and effort.
 
So you are kind of condemning them for doing what to me seems quite justified. 

 

[wuench]

I which I could just get put into suspended animation for 5 years until this whole cloud hype/fad/bs blows over.  
 
The Cloud = Cheap CPU + Cheap Storage - Performance - Security - Control  + (1000 * Hype)

 

[IVB]

I which I could just get put into suspended animation for 5 years until this whole cloud hype/fad/bs blows over.  
 
The Cloud = Cheap CPU + Cheap Storage - Performance - Security - Control  + (1000 * Hype)

I'm sure Blockbuster video felt the same way. Nobody is really going to stream video when they could have uncompressed local, right?

In 5 years I'll bet latency and stability are far better, and cloud is actually a valid option. It's not today, but 5 years ago streaming video was also niche.