"Unfortunately, we’re still in a world where a manufacturer’s first reaction is to lock things down, to make devices incompatible, in an attempt to extract as much profit as possible from the system. If this is your mindset, you’re not going to release an API (as Philips did), let alone encourage your competition to build on the same API (as Philips hasn’t)."

Yeah, IoT protocols are a warzone, hell, few companies/coders are even able to agree on general web API architectures (REST/RPC/SOAP - and everything in between. puke). Add MQTT, CoAP, XMPP or whatever other pet vendor protocol or semantic layer into the mix... total nightmare. What's left are a bunch of consumers hung out to dry because a these big old guard companies haven't learnt how to collaborate and deliver broad spectrum value to their customers.

A lot of hand-rolled integrations for many years to come! Whoever can alleviate that pain will likely end up dominating