> Few big players seem to be making use of such a thing. They'd currently rather have their own walled gardens. :)

Even some of the small maker targeted ones. For awhile I was searching for a cheap wifi connected microcontroller for some hobbyist home automation stuff. Both the Electric Imp[1] and Particle/Spark[2] products looked great, but they seem to both have obligatory cloud integration. If I spend weeks building something for my home, It has to be able to work until the hardware dies.

Luckily, I found the ESP8266[3] has pretty much all the capabilities I want, no cloud required.

[1] https://electricimp.com/

[2] https://www.particle.io/

[3] http://www.esp8266.com/