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by MostlyStable 671 days ago
Why not offer an either/or rather than both? Some people (I am one of them) actively do not want these kinds of things to be managed through the cloud servers. I don't want it to sync, I want to fully turn that off. I want to locally host, and I'm willing to take responsibility for that feature, including when it breaks. All I want is access to whatever the data reporting and control APIs are.

I get that I'm a tiny minority, and that very few customers want what I want. But A) it seems like giving me what I want should be very cheap (i.e should not entail ongoing customer support costs beyond normal, and in fact would get rid of the small cloud hosting cost) and B) I'd be willing to pay a premium to get it.
1 comments
wmf 671 days ago
In some areas like cameras there are a decent number of cloud-free alternatives. Hopefully as the IOT market grows we'll get cloud-free versions of everything.

I think you're too optimistic about costs though. Providing any support at all, even one-time during the install, is expensive and cloud-free IOT is going to require support due to home networks being broken.

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MostlyStable 671 days ago
Yes, support is expensive, but what I am proposing will, if anything, reduce support. I'm imagining something where, if I opt into local control, I am giving up all rights to any support that is not related to the core functionality of the device. For example the solar panels/inverters in the article. If I opt in to local control, then the only support I am entitled to is the solar panels stop generating power or if the inverter stops inverting. Anything that is network related is no longer the companies problem, because I have assumed complete responsibility for that. I'd even be willing to agree that, in the case that I ever decide I don't want local control, and I want to switch to the cloud hosting, that I will pay for the support required to switch me back over.

So if my home network breaks, that is not their problem. And they don't need to set it up, they just need to make it possible for me to set up, including figuring out how to make it work with my potentially broken home network. If it requires a new router because mine doesn't provide some necessary functionality? Not their problem. Etc. Etc.

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wmf 671 days ago
Consumer electronics doesn't work that way. If people can't get a product to work they will return it to the retailer and when the retailer gets a lot of returns they will penalize the company or drop them completely.
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yetihehe 671 days ago
> So if my home network breaks, that is not their problem.

Differentiating between people like you, who can take blame for misconfiguring device and 99% of other consumers is not viable for most companies. Also, if you bought our device and wanted to do that, I would probably make a firmware version for you that connects to your endpoint and give you some docs. But:

- Just talking and coordinating that possibility for one user would cost my company more than the final price of device, when considering time spent on this.

- You would have to spend a lot of time to implement a lot of functionality to glue our protocol to your desired endpoint.

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