Here’s the thing that so many dealers don’t understand. GONE are the days where people are willling to have a $3500 programming bill. You guys that are stuck in the 2,000s think you can still win over clients over your neat GUI? It may sure look nice but so many people just don’t give a rats ass. All they care about is if the system works. I would wager to guess that most of you guys that spent days programming a system didn’t win any future work from the GUI but that the system just worked.

I get it, I was in this industry during the GUI hayday where we were all so proud of each other’s interface’s. But with it also came with days of programming. A lot of which I would wager was just donated because it was “cool”.

I think this is why RTI still has any market share remotely left in this industry. Because most of the guys that still peddle the crap are so stuck in your old ways that you fail to realize nobody cares anymore! Your competitor just slung 3 more jobs and has 100x more capability to upgrade the clients in an efficient manner while you were still designing that beautiful single page interface for Mrs. Smith.

RTI clearly sees wizard based programming as the future because they came out with half baked APEX 10 years to late. This is ultimately why crestron pulled out of the residential market. They looked at what it would cost to develop a wizard based program for the sub 250k market and saw that there just isn’t a market there. (Which I think we can all respect)

Not once have I had a client say “gee I wish my interface looked different from my friends interface” if anything it just shows consistency. I dare anyone to make a solid interface like what C4/Elan/savant/urc has and give the client that kind of control in the time we can program an entire system. It just can’t be done.

So to the guys that love interfaces, just know that the time is quickly coming to an end. Also remember that 99.99999998% of clients don’t care to press two
Magic buttons on the interface to get them into a cool splash screen and a way to change settings around. People want simplicity and to have the system come on when they press the source. RTI and you guys need to wake up to that fact that your competition is running circles around you while your programming away.