A lot of valid points in this article out of the latest CEPro mag.

I wish point 5 was true about other vendors catching on. The big distro’s I use (AVAD,wave,ADI) sites still blow compared to snaps.

The Aesthetics part is definitely true. Heck just visit the nest doorbell thread that’s currently trending on here. Point 2 referencing doorbells also ties into this as well.

I do feel like a lot of the DIY products are passing our channel by in a lot of ways.


Anyways Julie good article! Now how do we get these manufacturers to take heed?

First of all, I'm not sure our industry was ever "the smartest". LOL Nerdiest, maybe.....

Secondly, I agree with most of her points as well. I don't have much faith in the stalwarts in our industry to gain any ground back they may have lost in the market. I cannot see how they can and remain profitable (if they are already at all).

I understand the veterans of the industry being cynical about these changes. I am there myself on a lot of things. But a shift is occurring. It is a generational shift that we are really not going to be very effective at trying to reverse, change, or stop from happening. It will happen, with or without us. So we can either adapt, or retire. I hope I can retire.

The compound issue is that the people out there designing and engineering this stuff are in the same age range (or younger) as the people buying and using it. The "old farts" will all be gone soon, and we will not have anyone who really "gets it" left in the industry.

The fact remains that there will always be people who are not capable of setting up even the simplest of products/systems, and there will always be people who would just rather not deal with it, and throw money to someone who will do it for them. Whatever those products/systems happen to be doesn't really matter. Our time is what is valuable. Price it accordingly, and you should be fine. :)

I can imagine similar discussions in the halls of Kodak as young engineers were told that they just don’t “get it” when the engineers tried to push Kodak upper management into marketing digital. It must have been similar to a martial arts flick where the Novice attempted to take the stone from the Master.

...something about blind squirrels

Ain't gonna happen!

The thing is, products like Sonos, Nest, Ring, etc succeed IMO because they have obsessive focus on single, very specific product and they obviously obsess about making it easy and nice looking for the end user. That sort of crazy focus, and all the time and money it takes to refine it into something really great is too much for most custom install companies to commit too.

They consider their market to be custom guys, so they can always push out half-baked product and lean on us to figure out all the technical details.

I was referring to Julie and this article.

Do you know Julie? she is a pretty darn smart person who has made a ton of contributions to the industry. I suggest you take some time and get to know her. Might learn something.

Whap! Take that!!

List 5

I learned the she is a die hard right leaning Democrat, that unfriends anyone who is more centrist, or left leaning, but I suppose that's just the norm these days.

You don't agree with me, you're bad and must be banished.

Manufacturers from all channels need to build stable products. Specifically, the CI channel needs to focus on robust stable products.

Features. CI Channel where our products are often 3x the price of a diy/IoT type product need to have a competitive feature set and a remote management toolset that we can use for multiple installation sites.

Take Doorbird for instance. I have a Doorbird, I dont want 200 clients doorbirds in my phone app. But I would love a windows client app that I can use to setup all of our doorbirds and saves all the relevant information. When a firmware comes along and breaks integration with ELAN or changes how its done I could easily move from client to client bouncing between gTools and DoorToolz fixing everyones shit before they even know what hit them.

This makes paying a bit more acceptable because it prevents a truck roll and a $100+ service call. And I am happy to sell the product because it makes managing multiple installations much easier.

Because of our Doorbird issues I would rather just not make the margin, slap a client provided Ring in and say not my problem, good luck.

Tech Support. Too long, too slow, too many agents are just looking to get to the next call as if they are graded simply on how many calls they run through rather then how many issues they resolve. Our ability to service our clients is often directly related to how these manufactures service us. For most companies its a complete mess.

Time is money, if im on hold for an hour thats $100 up in smoke. Times that by how many other techs are on hold industry wide and thousands and thousands of dollars each day are collectively pissed away industry wide.

What does all of that amount too? Client perception. Too complicated, too expensive, too many service visits, too many products that just dont work, too much frustration.

All directed at the local guy that did a fantastic job plugging all this shit in, documenting everything and still here we are on our 4th service call trying to figure out why the brand new router we provided completely locks up. Oh SnapAV who basically only sells to integrators put out a router that LOCKS UP when you have a ELAN or C4 type system in place!

So manufacturers get your shit together and stop putting the blame and the financial burden on our backs!

Really....what year do you want to start with? 94?

She began covering this industry helping it to be real before it was a industry.

I think I know my right from my left so yeah this makes no sense at all.

That maybe, but all she’s doing now is write about DIY crap that has no money in it. Even Michael Jordan had to retire at some point

She is writing about DIY stuff. I for one need to understand that part of the market and be aware of it because customers ask. Like it or not it is part of our segment. if it is of no use to you just flip the pages but no need to just be flip and rude.