[_kb]

Traditional home automation - Crestron et al - is the absolute wild west. Business models are overwhelmingly based around hardware sales, lock in, and customer retention through obfuscation and control. This applies to both manufacturers and integrators.

You won't find a professional integrator to take on a home-assistant based project as the economic incentive is not there. There are some good independent devs but most avoid resi due to volatility and relatively small projects compared to commercial.

[cybrox]

Which is an absolute shame because in the end it just causes many more millions to be wasted on re-building yet another somewhat "complete" automation solution with a different vendor lock-in that will become obsolete in 5 years.

In the long run, this business model will just not fly in a world with today's connection requirements.

[ianburrell]

I wonder if the Home Assistant boxes will help. Getting HA used to mean installing it yourself. Installer would need to come up with custom hardware. Now, they can buy Blue and Yellow and start from there.

[daredoes]

I develop things for HomeAssistant. The stuff I develop for free can be a hassle to support, so I don't see myself earning a good wage while being happy working on HomeAssistant for non-engineers.