Saw that a little while ago. Not sure if anyone else heard these rumors but I hadn’t.
Hmm, interesting.
Cue the unsubstantiated rumors and assumptions based mostly on preconceived notions!
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First rule of NDAs is, you don’t talk about NDAs!
I think.
No one’s ever asked me to sign one 
.
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Having signed far too many I can say...it depends. For the most part I was able to say that I was associated with X but due to the NDA that's all I could acknowledge. Some forbid even thinking the project name outside the environment of the project.
I know nothing. I can say that I have no relationship with aeotec, though, and am not testing anything for them at this time.
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Well - there goes that theory!
I've offered to do things with aeotec before, but they were disinterested at the time as they already had a number of people testing for them. Or maybe because they have seen how I bitch that their products are too expensive. LOL
I'm as curious is anyone to see if this is true, and when it will be announced if it is.
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I'm not at all surprised that Corporate Samsung wants to ditch SmartThings. I actually had expected this a few years ago when they shifted personnel.
The corporate imperative of long term market share building to help "upsell" into TV's and other higher end merchandise has been punctured. They are just not finding the impact on higher end merchandise from SmartThings. They gave it a few years, and found that it was only a cash drain and decided that enough was enough.
Aeotec sees a great opportunity for vertical integration in the IOT market. They also see a market (especially in the U.S.) open up. I think they are also somewhat nervous about the Apple/Google/Amazon announcement centering only on Zigbee (where they don't have an oar in the water). It could be a defensive move for them.
One has to wonder if this will somewhat shift the focus for the SmartThings product to be more "zwave centric". THis could mean (along with many more changes at ST), that they will be overwhelmed with change. Obviously somethings will be "farmed out" to AeonLabs personnel (in Hamburg), but will corporate software development be left in the U.S.? Will there be pressure to release a Hub with a gen 700 chip? Will they de-emphasize cloud to cloud integrations and Zigbee device integration in favour of zwave? We will have to wait and see...
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Well... if you don't sign an NDA it is fine to talk about NDAs. It's kind of a tell if you say "Sorry, I can't answer your question. I'm under NDA."
Did any of you look at the link I posted? Everything you want to know is there.
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It's on their web site now Z-Wave products and software • Aeotec
Deeper link with no detail: SmartThings gateway software & products • Aeotec
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My SmartThings experience has not helped Samsung's brand image. You can't keep a $69 hub working and you expect me to spend $3000 for a Samsung TV or $750 for a washer? Thank you, no. I don't want you sending down a buggy firmware update and causing me to miss a season of Game of Thrones.
I think where Samsung and SmartThings have failed is on the services side. Not all that surprising since they are basically a hardware company. How many of us dedicated HE users will rant about ST but still like their hardware? It's decent stuff.
If you're serious about the services model you really have to be committed to it and take bold steps. Think IBM, which for all its woes is much more of a services company than a hardware company. Samsung got into it half-heartedly and I think it shows.
I have a bunch of Aeotec sensors and I like them a lot. I know they are a German company but I do not know how well capitalized they are. So what do they get by buying SmartThings? The brand? The customers? The IP and the people? Not sure. Anyone know the company and the industry better than I (which is a low bar) and care to comment? I will say the Aeotec stuff seems more brutally functional and the Samsung hardware tends to be slightly more curvy-consumery. Maybe they get soft skills!
I was loudly vocal about Wink surprising customers with a subscription model years after investing in the hardware, especially since their cloud service was notoriously unstable. I dropped them like a hot potato. However you have to ask where the home automation sector is going, and what their business models look like. Think Netgear and Arlo. Yes, I complain about it too, but the economics are tough if you're merely a hardware provider in one price war after another. But if you're going to make the transition to a services company, you need to get the "services" part of it right.
Same thing goes for HE. Love what these folks have done... hope they have figured out how to make money! I know nothing about the company or how it's funded but I do wonder how long they can grow market share and revenue based on the hardware model. Ironically one of their three tenets is that this stuff should be local, which doesn't really support the MRC that comes with a cloud subscription model. I'd be fine with an online web-based orchestrator that then downloads code to the end point. But don't try that with Rule Machine. That would not be successful with a user interface that gives Blechley Park a fun for its money.
How to kill a product in one sentence.
The diversity play by adding Zigbee to the fold is much more likely IMO. Samsung/SmartThings is on the BOD of the Zigbee Alliance. Z-Wave 700 series improvements are looking pretty anemic so far (I understand that it's fairly early in the lifecycle). If there aren't some good functional improvements my guess is that Z-Wave goes the route of Insteon - works, but passed by by competition.
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Although in the past I have written expressing the opinion that Zigbee may be the eventual winner in the IoT protocol wars, I'm now of the thought that it still may be much too early to think that any one protocol is going to emerge as the eventual survivor (think VHS and Beta).
Nonetheless, I am very convinced that Hubitat has positioned itself well by enabling the three major legs of integration in the IoT space:
ZWave
Zigbee
Cloud/Local integration (e.g. Lutron, MyQ, Envisalink, are all examples that come to mind)
This inherent flexibility plays well with Hubitat's major strength: local execution.
Now of course, the split between services and one-time sales is something that Hubitat Management have to get correct - it's a difficult call in an uncertain and shifting market that requires some clever longer term thinking.
Yes, but I think probably what you mean by this are the end devices. The hub is probably a decent piece of hardware, but since it really is nothing without the unreliable cloud it must attach to in order to function, in my opinion it's not worthwhile.
The end devices are good, this is true, but they're not made by SmartThings or Samsung, and never were. Early end devices were made by Centrallite and the latest devices are made by SAM JIN.
Yes, I definitely meant end devices!
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I did. But I don't believe anything until there is an official announcement.
No doubt that this looks legit though.
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If it’s on there, they’ve spent the money and made the effort to get it certified. Now if you’re suggesting that they might go through all that and then not produce a product for sale, I guess if you have really deep pockets you could do that, but it makes no sense.
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