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Comment by newsclues | Hacker News Reader

I think the technology is ready but it’s held back by business model incompatibility.

The smart home should be an open source hub that integrates appliances, switches and lighting etc.

But the business model requires vendor lock-in closed systems.

It would be nice for the building code to start dictating some interop standards for this stuff to overcome the natural tendency of the business to make this a winner-take-all market at the expense of the consumer. At first blush, it feels like it would be a little out of their wheelhouse, but it's not entirely unusual since it responds to consumer interests. For example, Energy Storage Systems (batteries) are a new-ish thing added to the code around 2014.

Codes abs standards have working groups composed of industry, consumers and inspectors. New groups are created all the time to address new technology. Unfortunately the initial cost to set up is typically too high for most individuals leaving progress in building codes/standards up to corporations.

Building codes are primarily for health and safety, secondarily to prevent getting screwed by contractors. Making rules on batteries makes sense but smart home interoperability less so.

Even if we assume that companies are willing to support the systems they sold for an undetermined amount of time (something that will _never_ happen), this still won't solve the fact that the hardware itself enabling the "smart" features is bound to turn obsolete way before the appliance exhausts its lifetime.

For instance, I've seen chest freezers running for >30y without breaking; do you expect today's IT technology to remain viable for the next 30 years? What about new protocols that might appear that the hardware may not support, or new highly desirable features that are simply unfeasible to implement on the limited µcontrollers that power most IoT appliances?

You risk ending up in a situation like with LPT printers - when USB became dominant, lots of old printers ended up in landfills due to how unreliable LPT-USB adapters were. The printers themselves were often absolutely fine, but they had become too annoying and keeping an old machine around to use them was much more complicated than just buying a spanking new network printer.

Given the current dire environmental situation I wouldn't push for technologies that might cause perfectly functioning appliances to become obsolete due to a non-necessary secondary features. The only way out of this is for "IoT modules" to be removable, standardized and upgradeable, but thinking anyone would do that is delusional.

> but they had become too annoying and keeping an old machine around to use them was much more complicated than just buying a spanking new network printer.

To be fair the problem of unreliable USB to LPT adapters was caused by this. It was more economical to just replace printers so there wasn't enough demand for a quality converter.

If replacing legacy smart home devices is costly then it would provide a market for reliable adapter devices.

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