Yesterday, Apple, Google, and Amazon annonuced that they are teaming up with Zigbee and creating a working group called Project Connected Home Over IP. The Verge has a good post on what is going on here and why. And in that post they show this great xkcd comic:
I am hopeful that something good and useful will come of this new partnership between Zigbee and the largest tech companies in the world.
Over the last two weeks, the Gotham Gal and I have been moving into a new home we built and we have had moments of joy (like when we easily programmed our cars to open and close the garage doors) and pain (when we could not use a Nest thermostat in our office because “that HVAC unit doesn’t talk to Nest”).
When I sit back and compare this move-in experience to one we had twenty years ago, when smart home technologies were new and we were early adopters, I can see how far we have come. You can make a new home “smart” so much less expensively and easily now.
But we are still very far from where things should be and will be.
I am hopeful that some new open industry standards can and will help.
There is nothing wrong with going from 14 standards to 15 standards if the 15th standard is actually useful. And it may well be that the other 14 are too.
