CQC is not cheap!

I suppose we just have different "books" as to what we feel HA is, and in the end, it's good that we have choices. You got to choose a package that works for you, I got to choose a package that works for me.

I think this is a good point because it is frustrating to a lot of folks when these discussions devolve into arguments about the cost of plugins and maintenance fees instead of functionality. Too many threads start with a premise that most people want to use touch screens to control media equipment and that this should be the basis of all comparisons.

Those of us who want to automate phone systems and weather stations and elaborate voice actions but don't care a bit about touch screens or media room control are definitely using a different play book from the media room crowd but that being said, I don't think that media room control, or touch screen interfaces, or security systems, or any other technology constitutes a baseline that you can automatically use for comparison.
 
Those of us who want to automate phone systems and weather stations and elaborate voice actions but don't care a bit about touch screens or media room control are definitely using a different play book from the media room crowd but that being said, I don't think that media room control, or touch screen interfaces, or security systems, or any other technology constitutes a baseline that you can automatically use for comparison.

It just means that you are in a primarily DIY market and should look for DIY type products that provide those sorts of things because they are more important for the customers in that market. Though, I should say, it's not just 'the media room crowd'. In professional automation installations, which go way beyond just the home theater, the touch screen is far and away the dominant interface to the automation system. That's just the way that market is, and you can't really compete there unless you are strong in that area. Having a direct UPB or weather station driver, OTOH, would mean little in that market in comparison.
 
Though, I should say, it's not just 'the media room crowd'. In professional automation installations, which go way beyond just the home theater, the touch screen is far and away the dominant interface to the automation system. That's just the way that market is, and you can't really compete there unless you are strong in that area. Having a direct UPB or weather station driver, OTOH, would mean little in that market in comparison.

It begs the question though... Is this because this is what end users really want or is this all they know about because it is all that the "professionals" offer them. People want what they see and the only thing I ever see in magazines and brochures is shiny touch screens showing album cover art. Are the "professionals" responding to the market or manipulating it?
 
Though, I should say, it's not just 'the media room crowd'. In professional automation installations, which go way beyond just the home theater, the touch screen is far and away the dominant interface to the automation system. That's just the way that market is, and you can't really compete there unless you are strong in that area. Having a direct UPB or weather station driver, OTOH, would mean little in that market in comparison.

It begs the question though... Is this because this is what end users really want or is this all they know about because it is all that the "professionals" offer them. People want what they see and the only thing I ever see in magazines and brochures is shiny touch screens showing album cover art. Are the "professionals" responding to the market or manipulating it?

With the insane amount of fracturedness in the upper end HA market, I'm enough of a capitalist to believe that if telephone or weather integration would really provide a competitive advantage, a pro would have done it or absolutely demanded that Dean do it. There's just no way there's a concerted effort by one of many or thousands of CI's to manipulate anyone.
 
Yeh, I'd agree. There is no dominant force in the HA market that could do that. Every installer is an independent agent who is looking to sell the most systems he can. Clearly touch screens are a big selling point in the pro world and CIs are just responding to that.

People like having touch screens. They are inherently visually two way (a much higher bandwidth interface than voice) and can provide visual queues and prompts far quicker and more intuitively than any other type of interface. And with distributed media being one of the biggest drivers in the pro market, you have to have a touch screen for that. Trying to browse your media by any other interface would be very difficult.
 
From many years in the software industry, I have learned that most people like things simple. If a person is paying someone else to do it, then they probably just want it to work and are not going to spend lots of time playing with it. Also, how much need is there really to do things remotely? I would think most people (not the DIY person) would use that occasionally if at all.

Touch screens are simple and they are used when you're home. I don't think too many people would find it natural to talk to your house over the phone.
 
Also, how much need is there really to do things remotely? I would think most people (not the DIY person) would use that occasionally if at all.

In my entirely personal and I've been wrong before opinion, I think that's because it's not easy with pretty much every other package except CQC to even do things remotely. (and again, I discount webserver remote control as it's not wife-usage or IVB-coding-ability-friendly).
As an example, over the years my wife has questioned:
1) Need for a 2nd PC
2) Need for a laptop
3) Need for a wireless network (In 2002, the woman would walk around with a laptop that had a 50' ethernet cable, thought that was "ok")
4) Need for a network-enabled printer (so the office PC didn't have to be on)
5) Need for Quicken and online downloading of our financial transactions
6) countless other things

That is, until she got used to the convenience. Now that she's used to #1-#5, there's just no chance in hell she'll live without it.

I'm confident the same concept applies for remotely controlling your house. I've pulled up the security system darn near daily in the past few weeks:
1) to see if the wife is home, cuz she's not answering her cell or the house phone and we're trying to arrange for logistics for roughly 19K random events in the next month.
2) Wife asked me to check on who called last night as we were expecting an important call and the dimwit hadn't called us before we had to go. (the extent of our phone integration - if we had a message, we'd just call the house and retrieve it).
3) Disarm the security system so one of our "less than intelligent" friends could go get something from our house (he has a spare key) without tripping the alarm like he did last time.
4) Start a DVD for the babysitter who barely understands how to turn a TV on. She's smart enough to put a DVD in a drive, but I swear the teeny-bopper is baffled by the concept of a stereo system, and I weep for the future.

I personally believe that remote control of your house is the future, the only question is how much are you going to fight it, and whether it'll be like instant messaging and text'ing, where only the young'uns do it and the old farts refuse to do all that fancy stuff.
 
4) Start a DVD for the babysitter who barely understands how to turn a TV on. She's smart enough to put a DVD in a drive, but I swear the teeny-bopper is baffled by the concept of a stereo system, and I weep for the future.

I personally believe that remote control of your house is the future, the only question is how much are you going to fight it, and whether it'll be like instant messaging and text'ing, where only the young'uns do it and the old farts refuse to do all that fancy stuff.

I'm not against it and I'm sure I'll get to it. Maybe you're right and most other people will as well. As for the young being the ones to adopt it, didn't you just explain that the babysitter can't figure out your DVD player?

I once had a baby sitter who phoned my at my uncil's funeral because she could not figure out how to use the can opener. Not a complex, fancy electric can opener mind you. A normal, metal one that you squeeze on the can and crank until the can goes all the way around.
 
4) Start a DVD for the babysitter who barely understands how to turn a TV on. She's smart enough to put a DVD in a drive, but I swear the teeny-bopper is baffled by the concept of a stereo system, and I weep for the future.

I personally believe that remote control of your house is the future, the only question is how much are you going to fight it, and whether it'll be like instant messaging and text'ing, where only the young'uns do it and the old farts refuse to do all that fancy stuff.

I'm not against it and I'm sure I'll get to it. Maybe you're right and most other people will as well. As for the young being the ones to adopt it, didn't you just explain that the babysitter can't figure out your DVD player?

I once had a baby sitter who phoned my at my uncil's funeral because she could not figure out how to use the can opener. Not a complex, fancy electric can opener mind you. A normal, metal one that you squeeze on the can and crank until the can goes all the way around.

It's the stereo that baffles her, but she can IM and text like I can only dream of. I don't understand how kids thumbs can move quite that fast, or how you can use two thumbs on a tiny ass little flip phone.

But regardless of her stupidity, I don't give a rats ass as my 5yr old knows how to turn on the TV and I can handle everything else via the PDA. She lives 5 doors down from us so the kids are comfortable around her. That translates into us being able to do stuff more often. And, in the aggregate, she's clearly in the minority of tech-savvy kids, so the trend still applies.
 
Yeh, I'd agree. There is no dominant force in the HA market that could do that. Every installer is an independent agent who is looking to sell the most systems he can.

I suppose that is true but somehow I felt better being paranoid that someone is manipulating the market than being disappointed in the realization so many of my fellow HA consumers want to limit themselves to touch screen media control. In any case even if the Pros focus on touch screens and media rooms there is still a market for Hometrollers and Stargates for folks who want to play with the things the Pros won't touch. IVB is correct that there is more than one view (book) on what HA is.
 
As someone that has spent time selling and supporting the CI crowd, I can tell you that anything to do with voice scares the bejesus out of them. Remeber they have to support these systems after they are installed. As much as we'd like it to be, VR just ain't "there" yet.

If you are installing touchcreens, you can have a certain amount of premade stuff that you always use. I doesn't matter what the environment is. With VR EVERY room is different. If it's a very acoustically dead room, it reacts one way. If it's all glass and tile, it's completely different again.

If your profitability rests on a clean, fast, trouble-free install, which way would you go?

If you're selling and installing these systems, you want and NEED predictability and reliability. And you need something that is easy for the end user.

The last thing I'd want is a customer calling me every day because the system doesn't understand them.
 
In any case even if the Pros focus on touch screens and media rooms there is still a market for Hometrollers and Stargates for folks who want to play with the things the Pros won't touch. IVB is correct that there is more than one view (book) on what HA is.

Sure, I agree with that. And I think I said that up there, implicity if not explicitly. The point that got me into this was that someone was judging CQC via his very DIY expectations and saying that it doesn't offer much for the money. But it offers a huge amount of power for the money, particularly relative to what it's competing against. And it also offers more intangible things like a professional system level of stability, another thing that's a drop dead requirement in the pro market, but less so in the DIY market, and not cheap or easy to accomplish.

If (not that it's likely to happen) some CQC user decided to look at moving to HS, I think he'd be shocked to find that it doesn't support really high function touch screen support or full network distribution, since those are things that all CQC users really take advantage of pretty heavily. So it's all kind of relative, both to what you are currently doing with the system you are using now (which sets your expectations) and what is expected of the product in the market(s) it primarily addresses.
 
In any case even if the Pros focus on touch screens and media rooms there is still a market for Hometrollers and Stargates for folks who want to play with the things the Pros won't touch. IVB is correct that there is more than one view (book) on what HA is.

Sure, I agree with that. And I think I said that up there, implicity if not explicitly. The point that got me into this was that someone was judging CQC via his very DIY expectations and saying that it doesn't offer much for the money. But it offers a huge amount of power for the money, particularly relative to what it's competing against. And it also offers more intangible things like a professional system level of stability, another thing that's a drop dead requirement in the pro market, but less so in the DIY market, and not cheap or easy to accomplish.

If (not that it's likely to happen) some CQC user decided to look at moving to HS, I think he'd be shocked to find that it doesn't support really high function touch screen support or full network distribution, since those are things that all CQC users really take advantage of pretty heavily. So it's all kind of relative, both to what you are currently doing with the system you are using now (which sets your expectations) and what is expected of the product in the market(s) it primarily addresses.

Yes, but it is very easy for a Homeseer user to add MainLobby to the mix to get that high function touch screen support with reliability. Yes, some additional cost, but with great power and flexibility. No out of the box functionality today like Maestro can provide to Homeseer users, but Maestro is limited in customization and power.
 
In any case even if the Pros focus on touch screens and media rooms there is still a market for Hometrollers and Stargates for folks who want to play with the things the Pros won't touch. IVB is correct that there is more than one view (book) on what HA is.

Sure, I agree with that. And I think I said that up there, implicity if not explicitly. The point that got me into this was that someone was judging CQC via his very DIY expectations and saying that it doesn't offer much for the money. But it offers a huge amount of power for the money, particularly relative to what it's competing against. And it also offers more intangible things like a professional system level of stability, another thing that's a drop dead requirement in the pro market, but less so in the DIY market, and not cheap or easy to accomplish.

If (not that it's likely to happen) some CQC user decided to look at moving to HS, I think he'd be shocked to find that it doesn't support really high function touch screen support or full network distribution, since those are things that all CQC users really take advantage of pretty heavily. So it's all kind of relative, both to what you are currently doing with the system you are using now (which sets your expectations) and what is expected of the product in the market(s) it primarily addresses.

Yes, but it is very easy for a Homeseer user to add MainLobby to the mix to get that high function touch screen support with reliability. Yes, some additional cost, but with great power and flexibility. No out of the box functionality today like Maestro can provide to Homeseer users, but Maestro is limited in customization and power.

But then we're back to where we started this thread pages ago - in that case the price point could be blown out of the water FAR beyond CQC (based on individual needs, of course), you still may not be able to meet your objectives (ie, simple and efficient PDA control *still isn't possible* with that), and you'd have to determine which of 2 packages were at fault everytime there was an issue.

UpstateMike is right - you need to price out what you want, what you may want, and what path works for you.

And, Steve hasn't piped in here lately but he's fond of pointing out how different the packages are in their approach, and how you just may not understand how one works. I know that for me, CQC and the helpful user community "clicked" and the others just confounded me. Avoiding that heartache could be worth more than a few hundred ever would.
 
Yes, but it is very easy for a Homeseer user to add MainLobby to the mix to get that high function touch screen support with reliability. Yes, some additional cost, but with great power and flexibility. No out of the box functionality today like Maestro can provide to Homeseer users, but Maestro is limited in customization and power.

Perhaps. But I'm not totally sure how adding ML to HS makes HS more reliable necessarily. And you are getting closer to CQC's cost as well when you add them both together, plus the extra charges involved in each of them, separate upgrade charges over time, two separate programs to have to integrate, separate system configuration interfaces, and so forth.
 
Back
Top