More depressing then anything, not for the sake of control4 but more so on the data and factors plaguing our industry. The writing has been on the wall for a while, but, now is the time to start making a strategic change to how we operate!

[Link: strata-gee.com]

I know this is going to start drama but the last election was the writing on the walls. I started cutting expenses and locking in low rates on CCs/Cars/My house in Dec 2016. The last time team red had the oval office i almost had to file bankruptcy.

We're not in a full-blown war and as far as anyone knows, there's nothing like the sub-prime mortgage problem ahead, so I really don't think we're in for anything like the 2007 collapse.

Yeah.... it's always the fault of someone else right?

So you started locking down rates at that point?  Why would you pay more before that?  Why wouldn't you get things as low as possible right away?

You could have made the choice to do those things before 2016.  Did you just need someone to blame, someone to force you to make "adult" choices?

Seems to me "team red" is forcing you to grow up!

It took a while to get my credit back up after the republican housing market crash.


There was no gun to my head in 2016 because team blue was in charge. The country was still free.


They sure did. End of 08 aged me quite a bit. Thanks?

We have been at war for 18 years. Both parties like to drop bombs. I think it only feels like it isnt 'full-blown-war' because its our new normal.

After the last crash i am of the opinion that "experts" know nothing about finance or they are willing participants in the destruction. Team blue likes to turn the screws just tight enough so that regular people can still breathe. Team red turns it up to 11. Lets hope im wrong.

You are mostly right, only adjustment is you need to see them all for what they are, looters. Some just pander to you so you feel they are less toxic, but they are all playing the same game.

You are getting close, friend! 😀

Pushing all the political chest beating aside, I think C4 sales slide is the important think to dwell on. Perhaps that is what Brendon is alluding to.

There are only a handful of major players in this type of automation market. Crestron (which owes much of their success to commercial and even industrial), C4, Elan, Savant, etc..I suppose you could throw RTI and URC TC into that fold too. Out of all that group, does C4 have close to the biggest share? Particularly in resi which is where most of the CI group deploys comprehensive automation systems. Crestron certainly shares a top spot too but if one filters out commercial and industrial, Crestron's sales figures may be closer to C4? This is just an educated guess. I may be way off.

The point I'm trying to make is if C4 struggles despite their large market share, how the hell are the others like Elan, Savant etc surviving? Some try to eek it out with spreading costs over multiple lines (Nortek/Elan). But that doesn't hide the fact that the big tech players (Google, Apple, Amazon, etc) will continue to gobble up any newly created market share, as well as existing market share. The article never pointed that out, but it was constantly in my mind as I read it.

The crash happened because of us. We, collectively, are the only force large enough to stop or create such things. We created the crash in the absolutely standard way.

1. First we ate up all the sausage we could get while choosing to completely ignore how the sausage was being made.
2. We spent instead of saved, and so we drove up profits and prices and debt in a spiral that couldn't be sustained.
3. When the cracks started appearing, instead of doing anything reasonable that might have let us land semi-softly, we all pulled back hard and so the bottom dropped out of the whole thing, making us all vastly worse off and requiring the government to step in in a large way to keep it from going seriously south.

Human nature is the worst possible financial planner, but it always drives the large scale changes. I've said it a hundred times, did anyone here, during the late 90s, write their congress person and ask them to do something to slow down economic growth? I doubt it seriously. But it's not like we didn't all know it couldn't be sustained.

And, if we'd all have saved heavily during those years, it would have both slowed the economic spiral and left us all with a nice cushion when it started back down again so that we'd have had a controlled landing instead of a dive bomb, because we all could have kept spending at semi-reasonable levels. And of course all those people wouldn't have bought houses they couldn't afford either.

Not that Washington can't influence things, but it doesn't have nearly the economic leverage as we do collectively as citizens. So what we do is ultimately what matters, in those somewhat rare cases where we all line up in the same direction.

I can't be bothered to get up off the couch right now to find this book so I can give you the actual title, but it was very interesting. The most important thing I gleaned from it:

The four words that have caused the most panic and financial loss are "this time it's different."

It's totally naive and self-destructive to think that one party created any particular mess. My wife says Republicans ruined chances for truly universal health care under Obama. I say Obama either knew he could not get it through the actual Congress, or he was too stupid to know it. Either way he should have tried something less aggressive.

See how that just sets up a see-saw that leads nowhere? Either side could jump in right now and have cogent things to say!

While I talked with C4 a few times, it always seemed that the deal was never a mutual win-win, it was always stacked in their favor. If we did not provide the aggressive results that they wanted, they would take over all of our C4 clients and give them to someone else. As a small company it was too risky for us to deal with C4.

I'm not surprised the original C4 investors decided that they had extracted as much value as possible from their original investment and cashed out.

You sure do like to ignore that it was Democrat’s that created the housing bubble with starting the lending to people that couldn’t afford homes. You also like to ignore that it was Democrat’s that gave billions to banks to bail them out with zero conditions on the gift.

Neither party had anything to do with your credit score. If your credit score took a hit, it was because of your poor financial management and buying choices.

I think one thing that has been overlooked is C4 was always in the red. They spent tons of money, like most Americans before the recession. They didn’t get into the black by selling more C4. They got into the black by buying other companies. But this is usually a short term solution, because the negative flow of money is still there.

When your outgoing exceeds your incoming, your upkeep becomes your downfall.

Maybe the big picture / plan is to be acquired by Amazon or Google. Between SnapAV and C4, they cover nearly all of the smart home options and C4 has strong Amazon Alexa integration. Not to mention that C4 hired Amazon's top Alexa executive Charlie Kindel, [Link: hiddenwires.co.uk].