zlacker

The one word there sums it up: ecosystems. Every manufacturer seems to be insisting on themselves being "the ecosystem" and the end result is we ended up with dozens of ecosystems, none of whom have a full soup-to-nuts-yet-easy solution, and they don't invest enough effort into getting them compatible with each other.

Every few years I get tempted to go down this rabbit hole, hoping that in the last few years the industry has finally gotten its shit together, and every time I look, it's the same clown show, just with more clowns.

>>ryandr+(OP)
It's a https://xkcd.com/927/ situation because (1) there's so much money at stake and (2) many involved are incompetent/have bad taste.

>>gwern+B3
Eh, it's not exactly that... its more of

"Lets design a spec that anyone can use"

Premium brand that uses spec is $30 dollars a light, but works...

UNGADONG brand made in China is $10 dollars and has a 30% chance of catching on fire.

Premium brand goes out of business and market is taken over by crap.

---

Also, vendor lock in by the premium brand allows them to jack up prices even more.

>>ryandr+(OP)
Yeah, big companies (tech or otherwise) now have their ears up to prevent anything from becoming a success without them, and so nothing becomes a success because there’s no room for the users and startups around them to evolve to what the products really should be.

We need more things that are complete in themselves but causally work with other things. (Y’know, like the web.) Things that can perform tasks without an installation page, but readily extensible using MQTT or HTTP. That’s the kind of thing my company tries to build. That’s a very useful thing about Shelly, or any of the polished devices that expose an open protocol.

>>ryandr+(OP)
There are so many ecosystems that should die and get opened up. Televisions, car entertainment systems, closed app stores.

They hold society down.