More interesting smart home news.
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It’s probably their response to this news...
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Thanks. That is interesting indeed. They’re finally seeing that the tide could drown them if they keep fighting it.
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I agree @srwhite
I was actually thinking the same thing about the timing of this announcement, as when I read the apple, google, amazon announcement the other day I couldn't help but think about what the Z-Wave Alliance thought about this..
I think it may have hastened the announcement, but Silicon Labs and Zwave have been moving in this directions over the past two years. Since the purchase of the Zwave business last year, they have "open sourced" (probably not really the correct term here) the Zwave specs and some software. Since Silicon Labs is a founding member of many chip level groups, including Zigbee Alliance, Thread and builds or licenses chips (Zigbee, Zwave, Bluetooth, WiFi etc) used in most of our IOT devices, I think it has a pretty good idea of where things are going.
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SI has been dragging their feet for years, intentionally because there was no sense of urgency until recently. Now they've got some competition, so perhaps they'll finally start to play catch up.
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Silicon Labs just bought the Zwave business from Sigma Designs last year. Sigma Designs may have been avoiding the competition, but almost immediately after the purchase, Silicon Labs opened up a lot of their documentation and software. OpenZwave was even considering rewriting. Silicon Labs, making both Zwave and ZigBee chips, knows what each camp is up to.
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Seems like this should bring the cost of z-wave devices down?
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Another good read for a follow up to this article.
Nice to see someone else share that opinion. I truly believe that if it weren’t for this move by the Zigbee Alliance, SI would definitely not have altered their strategy so quickly. It was far too profitable for them.
