[BoxFour]

> The person you first responded to said that some problems exist, you said they don't, and I expanded a bit, agreeing with them.

The person I responded to said:

> I cannot turn my lights on because somewhere, potentially thousands of miles away, some datacenters failed, even if those datacenters could, ostensibly, only give me ads and "improvements" and not any core feature.

That problem doesn't exist. Your smart lightbulbs fallback to being regular lightbulbs in the absence of an internet connection, even for the most popular centralized service ones today (Hue).

> There's some truth to that.

That seems like a separate, if related, problem. There are plenty of smart devices that don't involve centralized services. Check out homeassistant.io. Plenty of devices where you own the product and they can't be shut down.

[TeMPOraL]

> That problem doesn't exist. Your smart lightbulbs fallback to being regular lightbulbs in the absence of an internet connection, even for the most popular centralized service ones today (Hue).

What about my robo vacuum cleaner?

Also, you keep mentioning Hue as if this is what people buy. People with lots of disposable income buy Hue. Everyone else buys some cheap $noname Tuya crap (or get it installed by the contractors), and whether or not it works offline, they find out during their next Internet outage.

[BoxFour]

> What about my robo vacuum cleaner?

Those aren't lightbulbs, which is what we were talking about.