I hate to even speak up on this, since I may piss them off and screw myself out of a chance to support the product, but here are my thoughts...
My concerns (though the 1 minute loss is a very serious concern if true) are twofold.
1. Window of opportunity. Currently, they have something that no one else has, but how long will that last? Think about what they have. If I were looking to compete with them, the fact that they've put in a lot of time and money to develop what is 80% replicated by a standard WAP, wireless card, and TCP/IP stack. I'd be looking at what I could do to get a minimal TCP/IP stack on a chip, and wireless NIC chip down to a good price at bulk, and make use of the existing wireless IP network.
That would provide probably 85% of the functionality they have, and you'd just have to add the product specific functionality to the modules themselves, and you could use a computer interface for the installation programming. I've not doing the analysis myself, but I couldn't imagine that with a fairly short period of time, that this type of setup would become easily price competitive, for a fraction of the investment. When you plug the device in, it does a broadcast to find the master programmer and asks to be let in and given an IP address and security key, and the user can bring up the configuration program and find any modules waiting to be let in and let them in if they they choose to.
You could argue that it wouldn't be as robust, but nothing wireless is going to be a 100%, since it will always be subject to
2. Cost of entry. I'm worried that they are going to make the cost of entry too high for folks like me, vendors of automation products. This makes it less likely that they will be supported by any open source-y or free type products at all, and even folks like me with commercial products but early in the company bootstrapping cycle will not be able to afford the price.
These two things could be seen as danger signs. Given that they won't have their unique position forever, and that the means to compete with them using mostly existing infrastructure exists (and therefore could be done by a wireless or internet equipment company at what to them would be a small cost), if they don't concentrate early on on market saturation and making their product name synonymous with wireless appliance control, they may pay for it later. I think that they should be do everything to help every automation system vendor out there to support their product and make it as easy as possible, and certainly not require some number of thousands of dollars for the right to support the product. They would sell more hardware and they could quickly entrench themselves in that market to the point that a competitor would have a high barrier to entry.
But I'm worried that they are going to take a 'high end' approach to what is not a high end product, and hurt themselves longer term. If you have a system that is supposed to appeal to the mid to lower end of the automation market (and clearly the high end can afford wired systems) you need to get it supported by products that can target that market. And if the tools to build a competitive product with mostly off the shelf hardware exists, all the more reason.
Then again, I could be completely wrong, and someone who knows more about marketing can feel free to correct me.
I'm sure it's nothing that a lot of people aren't aware of, and I'm suprized that Intel signed up wtih them instead of just doing something themselves along the lines of what I indicated above. But clearly companies like Ascend or LinkSys or Cisco and what not all could attack that kind of project, and it wouldn't be a big stretch for them (either in terms of technical or core market criteria.) They all have the expertise to do all the hard stuff involved related to the networking and already are moving IP based hardware in bulk, so they could afford to sell fairly cheaply.
