zlacker

>>pictur+(OP)
Sadly there is no money in home automation unless you can force them into your SaaS service. Making a good product and selling it once just doesn't get Wall Street excited anymore.

Honestly, I'd blame Wall Street here more than the tech companies, but it's really everyone's fault. Tech compensates people with stock, so everyone is incentivized to make the stock go up. That's not always doing what's best for the customer.

But also running a hardware business where every customer buys something once is a tough low margin business. New players don't want to get into the game and old players have to placate Wall Street. Even Apple is shifting more and more into services, but they can vertically integrate and are already "upscale". No one can pull of being an upscale light switch.

Honestly I think open source is the only thing that will save us here, but sadly there isn't a lot of money in that either.

>>jedber+Cg
Actually there is, but it's not cheap, so it doesn't appeal to the average consumer. KNX and DALI are effectively the standard in Europe for large commercial buildings. Green building certifications are requiring lights that turn on and off automatically based on occupancy and ambient conditions, and nothing else even comes close to matching it for this. Remote monitoring and management saves money compared to having someone periodically inspect every light in a building.

They are available for residential installs too, but for a new build you are talking about paying the price of a car (and not a Dacia) on top of what you'd pay for a standard lighting installation, so it's only a thing in luxury homes. For that you end up with truly automatic lighting (controlling lights with your phone is not home automation), variable colour temperature and much higher quality lighting.

But the average consumer doesn't care. A lot of the time they can't even replace a bulb in a set with the same colour temperature.