[VLM]

Firmware for Matter is going to be enormous, zwave is a lot simpler. Lots of pessimism in the market about the interoperability of Matter. No mfgr is going to be motivated to encourage their customers to interoperate with a competitors gadget. My prediction is everything will ship with a "matter" icon on it, but support will only be vertical silo, maybe even worse than things are now.

Thread is basically a full wifi-ish TCP/IPv6 stack, so, again, pretty huge compared to a tiny little zwave firmware.

Interesting angle to think about: Is the middle or end of a chip shortage the worst possible time to ship a HUGE new standard, or is it the best possible time because there's no stockpile of smaller memory smaller CPU legacy microcontrollers?

[daenney]

> My prediction is everything will ship with a "matter" icon on it, but support will only be vertical silo, maybe even worse than things are now.

There's already available evidence that contradicts that prediction. Eve[1] is rolling out a firmware update for Matter support that makes their devices usable across all Matter supported platforms. There are some features that aren't yet available at the Matter level so those will remain in their own app for now. Despite being iOS-only previously with Matter support they're now also reaching Android devices and are working on an Android app for it too to cover the missing features in Matter.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/12/23505097/matter-eve-firm...

[Dayshine]

Why wouldn't there be a race to the bottom as soon as some company finds a way to stamp out cheap white label components?

[VLM]

Agree with you, the first company to defect from interop will have a higher financial report then mgmt will demand engineering implement prevention-of-interop features or at least ignore the issue.