I doubt Amazon or Google wants to take ownership of anything that is not DIY-centric or must be sold/installed/managed by 3rd party integrators. they can easily replicate the C4 (or any automation) functionality in time for a fraction of the price to end-users. Hell - there is nothing in my house I cannot do (or need) with a Harmony Pro and Alexa. Big automation platforms are slowly dying and not coming back.

Although, partnering with a pro solution could be the tactic they need to win the War. My understanding is google learned from Sonos that the CI industry is the best way to build brand recognition.

What war? Google is here to tell you what to buy and Amazon is here to sell it to you. Amazon already won the home automation war. No one else can come close. When is the last time you heard of/saw an Apple HomePod?

Blame, blame, blame.  How's that been working out for ya?  Not great by the sounds of it.  Maybe it's time to try another approach.

We bought 2 houses just before the crash (06 and 07).  It wasn't easy but thanks to decisions made we got through just fine and still own them today.  Many people didn't make it through that, but how many put in the effort and how many just gave up?

I learned early on that a single income stream was never going to be enough, we worked hard at it and now we have many.

We're all free to make the best decisions for our lives.  Yes, there are certain rules we have to live by and those rules can change often with political climate, but in the end your financial freedom is up to nobody but you.

Some of us in this Country are striving for equal OPPORTUNITIES, not equal OUTCOMES.  Outcomes are based on decisions....good or bad.  From both of those personal decision comes education on what to do, and what not to do next time.  People will never succeed when they are just given things, THAT, is considered oppression.  THAT is how you keep people down!

That's taking it a bit too far. There are LOTs of things you aren't going to be able do with a Harmony Pro and Alexa. And of course, even if you could, the majority of people who wanted all those other things aren't remotely going to take the time to learn how to do it and then actually do it. So they will either do something extremely simple, do without, or pay someone to do it.

The problem, as with any system, is that it's not just the Harmony Pro and Alexa, it's getting those integrated with all the bits you want to control and to do so in a reliable way over time, which were never designed to work together.

The problem is always too many moving parts from too many players. Or, you reduce the number of players and the price goes way up. There's no open, high quality, ubiquitous backbone to build these systems on, so it's either low reliability or really high cost.

If we had that high quality, open backbone, then all these companies who are incapable of building systems, but quite capable of building components, could target that backbone and we'd begin to move towards a more building block approach to all of this stuff (though compliance would have to be tested, which is another huge complication.) And that would bring costs down all around, while still leaving plenty of room for added value by integrators who put various pieces together for various needs. You could go into an installation with various controller products all of whom could understand the installed gear perfectly.

But no one wants to build the system unless they also get to sell the expensive bits and pieces that fit into it. And I think there's zero chance of anyone herding all of those large cats into creating such a thing for common usage. And of course it would just end up being something created by committee, so full of compromises and whatnot that it wouldn't have been worth doing to begin with (e.g. UPnP.) It couldn't be a scenario where it's about how can we make something that would support a lot of existing gear in a compromised way. It would have to be here is a strictly but openly defined system that you have to completely comply with or not play. And that's just a huge chicken and egg problem that almost nothing can get past.

This is just one of those scenarios where an open market doesn't quite work, despite how well it does in the general sense. There's a big potential market, but we can never really serve it well because that would require a level of cooperation (within a continuing competitive environment) that just doesn't exist.

To be fair, I'm not sure any industry has managed such a thing really. There are obviously lots of standards but probably not at the level required for this. This is way beyond HDMI or having common connection standards and such. Plenty of people could spec out the general requirements competently. I could do it, having lived on the painful end of the interoperability equation for a couple decades. But it'll never actually happen, even if it was someone far more weighty than moi.

Fake News

The democrats are just as guilty. The primary difference between the two parties right now is that the democrats leave enough money in the economy so people dont starve to death while the republicans do everything they can to empty the register.


Both parties have everything to do with my/your/our credit score. If corporate America borrows money and cant pay it back the brass gets a bonus, the employees get the soup line and everyone keeps their private jet. If the average American misses a couple of car payments their interest rates go up to 15% for the rest of their lives.

I think you are thinking about the 5% of the population that has the intellect/education/time/means to know what any of that means. The average American is consumed with when the next paycheck is coming. Washington allows corporate America to engage in criminal activity that directly affects the lives of every American.

You and I didn't sit down one day and agree that Anywhere, USA is going to give Walmart free land so that they can build stores where they pay employees pennies while selling giant jars of pickles for $1 less than anyone else. The average American is and has always left out of those conversations. I don't know about you but i wasn't able to buy back any of my own stock over the last year or so. That was Walmart and friends.

The only person responsible for my credit score is me. It’s decisions that I make that determines if my score will go up or if it will go down. I have yet to see an administration on the right with 20%+ interest rates and gas rationing. And you also fail to remember that the Great Recession was a world wide recession. You sure do like to pick and chose which facts you want to include and which you want to pretend don’t exist.

So what you are saying is the problem is the people that were educated by the government run public school system. Got it...

This is a very interesting thread.

Damn, I am glad I got out before I went broke due to shit the politicians are doing. I am also glad I didn't buy into the 120% mortgages being pushed by the politicians, and I am glad that my company was flush with cash when the shit hit the fan. I am really glad that someone screwed up and the bottom dropped out in 98, because I was able to pay cash for a beach house as someone else's expense.

Damn government caused all that....LOL

Everyone knows perfectly well the most fundamental aspects of personal economics. If you spend and don't save, then you are screwed when it goes south. And if you spend a lot more than you have you are screwed when it goes south. That's all anyone needed to know to avoid the problem.


Everyone knew what Walmart was. It was widely discussed when they started being built. It was in the news a lot. I remember it well. Walmart was successful because people wanted cheap stuff more than they wanted to support mom-n-pop stores. If all of us had continued supporting those mom-n-pop stores, it wouldn't have mattered in the slightest what Warmart did.

The public absolutely has control over what businesses are successful by either doing business with them or not. They clearly chose to do business with Walmart.

I agree with just about everything you've said in this thread.

However, and this is not your doing, I must call out the complete, total and disgusting hypocrisy on this forum. You posted this as the second post of the thread. Do you know what would have happened if it was me and not you who posted the exact same words?

I would have immediately been drawn and quartered by half a dozen of the people on here. Totally unbelievable! I don't see anyone calling out for you to be banned from here. Instead, they (almost civilly) started a conversation regarding your talking points. I wonder what the difference is?

I think it has more to do with context.

Mac is like "the red team isn't helping and generally screwing things up for me"

David is like "you're all nazi sympathizers helping new hitler gas jews and should be killed"

LOL!  Can't even come up with your own reply, you have to plagiarize from successful people.

The outcomes of YOUR life are YOUR decisions Mac.  This Country ain't perfect (but it's pretty G damn good), there are issues and we're all working on the issues but stop blaming everyone and everything about where YOU are at in YOUR life.

Thanks to this great Country, YOU make the decision on the path you take, YOU determine the outcome.  It's not going to be easy but guess what.... it's not supposed to be.  Thanks to those that came before us, at least you have a say in your own future!

Many don't.