“I too am very concerned about your claim about trying to work with everything commercially available”
Ah but I am specifically referring to DEVICES as in the sensors detectors and actuators that actually “do stuff” in the home. I am NOT referring to “everything” to include everyone’s cloud stack out there.
When you take a device like an Alexa, well that device CANNOT work without the cloud - why? Because the processing needed to decode human speech is far greater than a $10 processor and some ram and firmware can handle. The Alexa device is truly nothing more than a dumb terminal - all the real heavy lifting is being done in the cloud servers.
If we were at a point in hardware and computational development where we could actually decode speech commands in the Alexa device and pass it to Vera as keywords or some such - then we would have lots of competing speech decoders on the market - lots of Alexa’s on the market. But we aren’t so to use Alexa, Vera has to talk to the cloud - specifically has to talk to Amazon’s servers. Which means that the moment Amazon thinks it can monetize AVS on the back end, they are going to start charging Vera.
I am 100% with you in that IFTTT, Stringify, google homes and such are all interesting but secondary. Those are not “devices that do stuff” When I need to close a door by computer control being able to shout at some black device is a “nice to have” but being able to actually close it is a “must have” and the actual closing ISN’T being done by the could it’s being done by the black box with an arm screwed into the door and the door frame. Vera needs to be able to talk to that black box more than it needs to be able to talk to Alexa.
Vera needs to understand that it and devices like it are never going to be interesting to the “dumb user” base out there. Those people will always pay the $100 a year to continue to be computer ignorant and will burn up hours of support time with some poor guy in India forcing him to do all the work to setup their Alexa to control their whatever. In fact they will also be paying their HVAC guy to install the “works with alexa” thermostat because, hey, thermostats have something to do with HVAC so the HVAC guy should know how to do it, right?
They will be paying their pool boy to install their “Alex enabled pool monitor”, their Brinks home security guy to install their “Alexa-enabled security system”, and so on and so on. This despite the fact that the HVAC guy, the pool guy and the Brinks guy know absolutely NOTHING about Alexa programming. And they will pay the yearly fee because Alexa told them they need to and they will BOAST about paying it because ultimately from their POV it’c cheaper to pay the $100 a year than bestir themselves to crack a manual and actually LEARN something other than how to sit on the couch and swill beer when they are not working whatever their specialty job is.
I have a family full of these people all making buckets of money doing whatever sales or marketing or management thing they do which boils down to greasing people’s palms and getting other people to grease theirs. They are good at it so they make a lot of money. They don’t swill beer in the evening but they won’t spend any time outside their boxes learning anything outside of their specialty. They are like 80% of the population. I and a couple of family members (some now dead of old age) are the “doers” of the family, we are the ones who know how to wire, plumb, tile, concrete, etc. etc. The rest of the family is continually amazed that I fix my own cars, do my own house wiring, tile my own bathrooms, repair my appliances, install my water heaters, etc. etc. after coming home from a day of setting up computer networks and administering large systems along with writing the occasional internal use software program. They don’t understand that the more you learn and the more different things you do the easier it is to learn to do something brand new you have never done before. 80% of the population in the United States today does not understand this. 80% of the population when they need something new or something of theirs breaks they pick up the phone and call a contractor. 80% of them will eventually have their homes run by Amazon and Google.
The Vera system and the Hubitat and the various open source ones like Home Assistant for the Pi are never going to be for that 80%. They are for the people you see walking around in the electrical department of Home Depot buying wire and cable and electrical boxes, or walking around in the tool section buying drill bits, or walking into Autozone and telling the clerk what they want and helping him to look it up (and not asking him how to install it) or ordering blower motors from Granger for their furnace because it’s cheaper than paying Carrier for the same motor.
The computer industry back in the 70’s and early 80’s was only selling to these people and they were making lights blink on the front of S-100 systems. The great old (now gone) industrial companies like Delta were selling shop machines to them 2 decades earlier. These people were running dialup modems and Gopher on the Internet before it was called the “www” and they were the ones who got Linux off the ground. Today they are messing with the Raspberry Pi and the Arduino.
They will never be “into” Alexa and speech stuff like that until the day comes in the future that the devices like Alexa will be so powerful that all the computation being done in the cloud right now will be done on the device and the device doesn’t need the cloud. Then those people will magically appear and start connecting all those Alexa’s together into a massive parallel processing computer that will crack encryption keys, or otherwise bother the ivory tower types.
Vera needs to market to those people because when Vera does the labor of getting compatible with a $5 motion sensor those people’s time is freed up to build complex house control systems that use lots of those $5 sensors and many other products besides. And, they will be evangelizing Vera to all their friends and family and customers who are in the 80% that Vera has a chance to sell services to.
The Vera company does need an ongoing revenue stream they need to pay their programmers. But ongoing revenue streams ONLY come from the 80% out there who would rather pay than play. For the Googles and Amazon’s of the world they are so large and rich they can afford to pay for many many years without a return to break into that 80% so they market closed “golden handcuff” systems. They don’t care that the 20% out there hate them and their closed ways. But for Vera and Hubitat who are smaller they can only tap that 80% through the 20% so they must become loved by the 20% and the 20% will then carry them in to the 80%.
