Dean Roddey
Senior Member
BobS0327 said:'m beginning to think that this cloud issue is more of a generational issue than a technical issue.
It's like the baby boomers versus the GenXers. The BabyBoomers want to live in the 20th century. That is, use a Digital Multi meter and screwdriver to attach a foreign sensor to a HA sytem and configure it using some draconian protocol via a Windows desktop. Whereas the GenXers want to use JSON, RESTful, subcribe/publish technologies to install and configure sensors etc.
Or maybe it's the following scenario..
BB: “I just turned my living room lights on using my BlackBerry HA app. That's Groovy!!!”
GenXer: I just had an intelligent conversation with Alexa, my smart home controller on the status of my home. That's PHAT!!!”
There's absolutely nothing wrong with being a neophobe. My personal preference is to adapt emerging technologies that appear to be the future of technology. In this case, cloud technologies. If folks didn't adapt to innovative technologies, I believe we'd still be driving Model T's.
I find that a bit condescending. I probably know more about JSON and HTTP and various other types of communications technology than 99.999999999% of GenXer's. And I bite off more new protocols and software technologies technologies in a typical year than most people will in their lifetimes.
So it has nothing to do with my generation or my lack of initiative in learning new things. It has to do with the very basic maxim that the more moving parts a system has, the more likely it is to fail. Cloud based systems have many more moving parts. It has all of the same moving parts a local system would have (the fact that they aren't local doesn't mean they don't exist) plus all of the other moving parts required for non-local logic and monitoring.
You might consider SmartThings as an example, as I mentioned. They are trying now to move more to a local control scenario. You really think that a bunch of people whose bios on their web site use the word 'cloud' about every other sentence would do that if they hadn't learned the hard way the realities of cloud based automation? Of course monitoring and remote access are obviously useful applications of cloud based technology. But just because you have a screw driver, that doesn't make everything in the world a screw.
* BTW, technically I'm also a GenXer. That generation starts a lot earlier than most people think, by convention anyway. GenXers are the children of the baby boomers, who became young adults in the 80s. So most folks who study such things start it at the early 60s, which is when I was born (to baby boomer parents), and I graduated in 81, so I became a young adult in the 80s.