I’m not sure Amazon is “beating” SmartThings - YET. They have one device (Echo), not an ecosystem. Here’s the thing: that one device (now spinning off ancillary products) is A. awesome B. improving all the time. Can/will they jump in and compete head on with SmartThings/Iris/Vivint/etc? YES!
Here’s why:
They get the user experience as good as any company out there
Cloud systems - yeah, they’re the biggest/best cloud provider out there
Progressive improvement - they constantly dump tons of cash back into their infrastructure
Integration - they won’t be afraid to open up to other products. They’ll make money selling their competitors products too.
In 2 years, they’ll be as good or better than all of today’s established players.
I agree with almost everything you said, except this one point. Over the last 18 months, Amazon has moved away from its original policy of competing head-to-head.
Before this last Christmas season they made the decision to stop selling other people’s streaming media players, including the fourth generation Apple TV and Google Chrome cast, if those devices were incompatible with Amazon prime.
So at a time when Walmart, target, and even Costco were featuring AppleTV, Amazon didn’t have it all. They even block their third-party sellers in Amazon marketplace from offering it.
They do continue to carry all kinds of AppleTV accessories and even remotes.
However, if you go to Amazon and search for AppleTV, the first thing you’ll see will be the Amazon fire TV.
It’s not quite clear what all of this means, but it’s not a simple “we’ll sell anything” position anymore.
Wow, that’s interesting and disappointing. I wonder if that’s them trying to force Apple to preload Prime Video onto Apple TV??? So Chromecast is gone too, but Roku is still there. Weird.
Interesting thread. And speaking of network engineers, I am also one. I remember the days of TokenRing, Novell, LanTastic, coax cable, and all sorts of competing P2P and server-based networking products. There were even RS232 networks then! IMO, the current state of “smart home” offerings is a lot like those days. We early adopters are paving the way for the eventual truly smart home… and of course, feeling the growth pains lol
Heck, I’ve even worked on XNS and PUP networks (DECNet, Vines, StarLAN, … ). I even remember the great renaming and when IP just was classful. And X10 when it was an ugly brown color.
Pathworks eventually found its way into Windows… which for a time ran best on a protocol calked netBuei. Yeah, it took decades before the clutter finally faded, and the world standardized on TCP/IP and Ethernet.
Bet you even know who Archie and Edith are… 