| Mea culpa: I used the term "image recognition" very haphazardly. What I meant to say was "the service provides a lot of features that are only possible through heavy analysis of the video." Have you considered the engineering effort that'd go in providing two different behaviors for the camera? Let's say we decide to support the simplest case: FTP to your local NAS. How do you format the video for it to be consumable by a normal user? Filling your hard drive with thousands of small video files is not a great experience, so that's a problem. We could buffer as much as we can in-camera and then FTP a biggish (200mb) video file. Now that introduces a delay, because you can't really watch the video until you are done buffering, so no real-timish stream. So you have to come up with a third alternative that provides every other feature the online camera has, because users will complain if their offline experience is different. Then again, your local NAS might be stolen by the same burglars that broke into your house, and the whole exercise was a waste of everyone's time. Multiply that for each other possible combination ("I want Dropbox support!", "I want my files to be in an AVI container instead of MP4!", "I want the camera to have a SIM slot so it can send me SMS messages when there's a notification!") and you have a recipe for disaster. You get featuritis, lots of technical effort, and no actual financial incentive to do any of this work. Unless we sell a $700 camera, and nobody wants that. As a small company, Dropcam had to draw the line somewhere. We didn't want to be the product that provided a solution for every requirement that came our way (and believe me, we've seen all of these before), but rather a good product for people that were happy with: 1) a product that worked as advertised (one day, a group of us were trying to setup a competitor's product: it took 4 engineers over half an hour before we gave up. This was supposed to be a "5 minute setup") 2) a product that evolved over time: running features in the cloud allows you to give new value to device owners without requiring a new device 3) trusting the company to have strict internal processes to avoid unintentional or malicious access to anyone's video (this was not treated lightly: a single case of anyone snooping on someone's stream could completely ruin the trust the users put on us.) |
If people based their product's features on product/market fit research from Hacker News threads, nothing would ever sell.