Comment Re:Key words (Score 1) 155
> Why would any rational person choose this?
Because they were promised "better". They were told that, yes, sure, the vendor has inserted themselves into lots of things, but that vendor was super keen to make sure it all worked out really well and that things would be great as a result. They were going to make everything talk to everything, and it was all going to be easily controlled and managed.
You might fall for all this as a rational person. As a cynic, you never would. Some people aren't that cynical.
FWIW, home automation is cool - but as far as I can see, no one vendor does anything like a decent job of it. If you can't have multi-vendor, multi-platform, mutli-everything, then it's going to be a bit limited/crap/compromised. If you can have multi-everything, then it falls to you to do all the integrations and make it all work - so nothing like the "plug and play" utopia the vendors tell you they can deliver. Even then, swapping one vendor for another isn't always easy, and actually a lot of supposedly "smart" devices are really pretty much dumb as a post.
Whatever it is about home automation, it seems to me that no one has "cracked" it yet - nor does anyone seem to be on a path to do so. If anything, most vendors have realised it's not the money making cash-cow they thought it was and are scaling back their former ambitions.