DanielEran

hmurchison said:

None of these big companies are going to win anything in Home Auto. 

The Echo is Home Auto Lite 
Google is Diet Home Auto 
Homekit is Home Auto bridge 

I speak to people almost everyday that are in the midst of new construction and I ask them about what they are doing to prewire.  Most have builders 
adding in a scant few cable and speaker runs. 

Proper Home Auto is about infrastructure first.  It's about the local network.  Voice assistants are simply devices on the periphery and that's where Apple, Google and Amazon are playing.  They do no compromise the heart of the system. 

One thing I’ve noticed is that it’s hard to plan for the future. Nice hotels from the 90s all thought they were future proof with cat5/6 and RJ-45 for a future of fast internet, only to find out that today almost nobody even has an Ethernet port on the computer they’re holding. 

And shortly before that hotel rooms (and fancy homes) were wired up for extra RJ-11 for dialup internet!

Some luxury homes from the 70s are wired up for PBX landlines, twisted pair speaker wires (maybe in stereo!) and of course central vacuum. 

JonInAtl said:

In the long run, I believe that Apple and HomeKit have lost the battle in home automation.

Like VHS vs Betamax- while Beta was a superior product offering, it lost to VHS due to VHS starting out making two smart moves.

2. 

VHS and Beta were ecosystem (movie and cassette) dependent rivals from a very different era. 

Before homekit here were many rival protocols and proprietary variants, with no consistent security or integration model. 

HomeKit is a model for security and interoperability, and also an interface for Siri voice control, Home (and other) app control and programmatic layouts and scene control.

Its also an iOS development platform that ties into notifications (iOS alerts, Apple Watch) and other services. 

Alexa is a voice platform that runs in amazon’s cloud. It shares some things in common with Siri, but it’s not similarly integrated into iOS.

it has adoption mostly in the US, in English. 

Recall that it wasn’t long ago that the blogosphere decided that Android won on tablets and that Apple should probably just give up. So it’s premature to assume that the same honking noises know anything other than what side of their bread is buttered. 

rogifan_new said:

The Information reports that Amazon is gaining an edge on Apple with smart home builders so AI uses it as an opportunity to smear Amazon and accuse the company of surveillance. Why am I not surprised. OK AI if Amazon is such a bad actor that people will need to “rip microphones out of their own ceilings” why isn’t Apple doing more to court home builders to make HomeKit and Siri the preferred platform for smart homes? Also why does AI have such a bias against data? Companies using data to provide better products/services isn’t a bad thing. I think we all know if Apple was the leader in this space AI wouldn’t be complaining and certainly wouldn’t be calling it “surveillance”.

So by your twisted logic, one can’t even be critical of ISIS burning people alive because “what if the USA were burning people alive?”

If Apple were also harvesting data and marketing its customers as data-chattel, then it wouldn’t be any different. But that’s not the case, is it? Protecting user privacy is one reason why buyers trust Apple and pay a premium for its products. Amazon and Google aren’t fetching any premium. They are selling low margin low end stuff while their higher priced offerings don’t sell in commercial significance. 

And if you actually read the article, the most damning criticism of Amazon’s Alexa strategy are direct quotes of The Information.

Saying that Alexa appears to be lining up more partners is like saying Android is appearing on the most tablets. But are any making money, is there any difference in user privacy/malware/spyware, and is either sustainable long term? if you know all the answers, why aren’t people reading your editorials, or why aren’t you running a successful tech company, rather than lurking in forums and sharing embittered opinions that are both facile and generally wrong? 

ph382 said:

Can a school district set up Business Chat to tutor students on Calculus, for example?  Or is this interwoven with the CSP software?  Trading pictures would make this possible, above and beyond a text conversation.

On what scale are you thinking? Certainly, a teacher could directly chat with students over IM. They could even use off the shelf or even custom iM Apps for feedback/testing. The same could be done by any small business with their client base.

The point of Apple Business Chat is to scale across thousands or millions of customers. That's what requires the CSP. 

The solution, of course, is clear plastic backpacks for all adults.