I think they are trying to get ready for CES. Even large companies like Apple or Microsoft have pulled people from certain tasks to work on time critical projects.
Lets give them the benefit of the doubt and wait until CES less than a month away. If they don’t get smart and start to address things at that time, we know that we have bigger issues.
CES shouldn’t impact engineering output for several months in a row… I’ve been as supportive and patient as anyone up to this point. Now if they announce Hub version 2.0 is ready to ship day of CES and all our problems are now fixed and performance is fast, then I’ll be forgiving. When was hub 2.0 promised, February 1st?
They are hiring more staff. This slows down progress more than anything at least in the near term. The existing staff are taken from their immediate duties to bring the new employees up to speed. Ben indicated Wednesday they will have 200 employees by this time next year.
Mark my words, it is going to get worse before it gets better. However, they are investing in the future so this is one ship you don’t want to abandon (in my opinion).
Now you have to ask yourself how much revenue they’ll need to support this headcount and where the dough is going to come from. Selling $99 hubs? Do you really think Samsung is going to spend heaps of cash supporting competitor’s products like Nest, Hue, Sonos, etc.? I think what we see is a gradual pivoting of SmartThings towards Samsung’s own products and technologies.
That may be true, but if they do it at the expense of other devices, it is a failed strategy in my opinion.
The winner in this niche is the one who gets the most installations and becomes the de facto standard. Users will shy away if they think it is proprietary.
Samsung could care less about revenue or cost right now if they think they have a possibility of be the leader in this niche.
Wouldn’t be the first time for samsung; or the second, or the third, or the… well, you get where I am going with this. They have a long history of cutting off their nose to spite their face, mostly due to arrogance and envy of Apple’s superbly marketed, proprietary ecosystem.
It would be extremely foolish for anyone, even Samsung, to pay $200M for a dubious title of the “niche market leader”. When ST was a start-up, it was expected to lose money to build up customer base and gain market share. Now, that they’re a part of the multi-billion dollar corporation, they may get away with zero profits for a while, but no one will tolerate losing money for too long no matter how cool is the technology they work on.
With a headcount of 200, their annual budget is probably to the tune of $30-40M. Their only known source of revenue is selling $200 kits. Even if they sell them at the insane 50% gross margin, they would have to sell over 300,000 kits a year just to break even. That does not sound realistic to me. Also consider that with their current business model (e.i. selling kits and providing free cloud service for life), the more customers they have, the more expensive it is to maintain. This model is not sustainable in the long run.
Probably a bad term for me to use.
This is a wide open market with a lot more potential than I think you are giving it. To me every home WILL have smart devices. Which firm will be driving the bus so to speak? How much is that worth?
It will be the technology partner people are most comfortable with. Ideally, Apple or Google will succeed at this. Most folks won’t adopt a third ecosystem for smart things; the least resistance will be the path of the tech ecosystem they are already a member of.
Samsung wants this desparately, but clearly didn’t have the chops to pull it off, and I still have my doubts. In fact, if I had my chips on the table… they would be riding the square labeled “samsung eventually screws this pooch”.
Exactly. The most successful smart home products on the market today are smart lights and smart thermostats. These are the products that most people are comfortable with and that don’t require a lot of learning. Anything that requires convoluted setup process, programming, reading lengthy manuals is not going to make it to the mass market. So for that matter, SmartThings is a niche product. If Samsung is serious about getting into the smart home, their best bet is to use the products that people already know and that sell in millions, i.e. appliances. Which brings us to the question: where does SmartThings fit into this picture?
Is it Just me the lack of response from ST in this thread is a little alarming?
No, the fact that SmartThings hasn’t booted all the haters is proof enough they are listening.
Who else in the IoT space has a forum semi-dedicated to bashing their current limitation of their product?
What in this thread warrants a response from SmartThings? I don’t think the vocal few here on the forums who insist on ranting about lack of local hub support, system instability, lack of this, lack of that represents the total audience using SmartThings.
This is a growth company, struggling with the massive expansion and acquisition. CES will be the milestone for the future of ST. Others will enter or enhance this space and if ST isn’t a player in that mix, they will have to catch up, adapt, or die. Simple as that.
Yes it is great that they let people vent and share their views and they should.
However a couple of targeted responses would settle things down. now it seems to be snowballing into a ranting mess.
True there is a lot of issues to resolve but just some reassurance that they are working on it would go a long way.
Cheers
Although you may not be referring to the level of detail as I am I thinking, it seems to be a reality that published “Product Roadmaps” from Consumer Product companies are very rare. Apple (being a very particular example, though I wouldn’t say they are unique…) is always very secretive until official announcement dates.
This forum, and the Community Office Hours, helps give us a little more insight than the non-observing public, but a fully published and updated “SmartThings / Samsung Roadmap” is not likely. There are valid strategic reasons for this: (a) Staying ahead of the competition, (b) Maximize flexibility to respond and/or pivot according to market and business conditions, and (c) Avoid publishing promises that might not be kept due to any number of forces (time constraints, business changes, technical issues, …).
Business-to-Business (B2B) companies, though, tend to be a little more open to sharing their plans, particularly with bigger customers and partners, but often under non-disclosure agreements. Actually, it’s quite likely there are a significant number of SmartThings’s “partnerships” in progress, and each of these is getting more future and “internal” information than we will ever get.
Perhaps there could be some formal (?) way for smaller SmartThings developers/integrators to organize so that we could have a bit more clout and justify a bit more insider knowledge. Doubt this would make a big difference though. SmartThings is a for-profit business, not an open consortium or other sort of organization. Nurturing and retaining their developer community through engagement here is only a very small part of their business model.
If this were my company, my focus would be on mass market consumers (not long tail) and high-value efficient partnerships (retail and integration). I’m pretty sure this is the approach ST is taking.
So I was starting to think I shouldnt of started this thread but on reflection I am glad I did.
Firstly it wasn’t a ‘rant’ about SmartThings. I am not entirely sure how people expressing their frustrations about a platform that promotes itself as a Smart Home solution that includes well established products such as Hue and Sonos, and indeed lauds their integration via blog posts on their site, is a rant.
For some of us it isnt reliable and integrations dont work all the time. Then there are those of us that have not just us invested in it (i.e the techy types) but who have convinced our partners and families that this is a great system that will improve our homes both from a usability aspect and a security aspect.
I prefaced my original post with a success story. I then detailed my frustrations with ST.
I agree this forum is a great place but its not unusual for forums to be used as a place to express issues with a product. We have every right (even if we are a vocal few which honestly I don’t think we are) to post here on a company sanctioned and created forum about our frustrations.
You can’t create a product and then promote it does this and that when a lot of the time it doesnt.
Sadly some of the comments on this thread and elsewhere make me think your dammed if you do your dammed if you don’t and thats not something I expected to encounter here.
As I have said before I love ST but it has issues that absolutely have to be raised by us the users and we have every right to do so.
Agreed. But that gives @pstuart and I the right to raise other points as well. Generally we are both very positive people and when we bring positive thoughts into a negative thread we are berated. I know I am just looking good a positive debate.
You are one of the few that is fair and brings up both sides and that is very refreshing but creating a thread like this generally starts a gripe fest over the same issues. Yes I understand it’s been a while. But STs has said many times there are fixes coming. At this point you need to decide if you believe them or not. If you don’t, leave. If you do, stay. They have been talked about many times on the forum and don’t need a new thread every week. If I were STs I would of stopped responding around this time as well. Why waste your time when the people that normally are vocal on these issues obviously aren’t going to change. When they have an update they will let us know.
I thank you @jonallsebrook for being a fair man.
God bless you all. You are my brothers in arms.
Actually, I don’t see a lot of negativity in this thread, except maybe for @pstuart’s labeling those who dare to vent their frustrations as ‘haters’. Questioning status quo and pondering the future is simply human nature. Deal with it.
The purpose of this discussion is not to solicit comments, rebuttals or revelations of future plans from SmartThings. I believe they shared with us whatever they could and if they don’t say more, there’s probably a good reason for it. It’s not a question of believing in what they’ve promised and patiently waiting for it to be delivered. I believe there’s nothing wrong with doing independent analysis based on available information and industry trends. I’d rather be ahead of the curve than be left high and dry like former Revolv users.
I actually thought pstuart’s use of hater was intended to be funny.
Most of these frustrations could be resolved with information and firm dates for fixes to be released. Right now we have to keep checking back which is a waste of time and kind of frustrating. I’m thinking of posts like this one that suggest we check back tomorrow, four days ago. Actions not showing in Harmony Hub Control
Or the Android 1.6.8 release that said it finally fixed the Jawbone Up24 brokenness. It didn’t. As the thread asks me to do, I’ve been staying tuned since Nov 13. Emailing support didn’t give any ETAs, rather just a “Unfortunately that fix didn’t quite make it into the latest Android release – that release note is mistake. Thanks for bringing it to my attention, and sorry for the inconvenience.”
Simply a list of known issues with dates to have fixes released would solve a lot of the frustration in the community as folks keep returning to see what works and what doesn’t. And I would suggest removing blog posts and marketing which promote functionality that has not worked for a long time, Harmony and Jawbone come to mind. Harmony ain’t cheap. It’s not a good welcome experience for a new SmartThings user to buy one and find out that it does not integrate as advertised with ability for SmartThings to control Harmony Actions.
Just the facts, please!
Where was anybody (other than perhaps SmartThings) berated???
At least someone realizes the humor in words…