Learning the Wrong Lesson from a Ripoff

Peter Himler draws the wrong conclusion from his bad experience with The F***ing Internet of Things — Adventures in Consumer Technology.

I soon learned that I had very few options in terms of service providers. The design of the Crestron system is quite complex, i.e., each system is programmed to the individual specs of the dealer and the dealer is the only one with the keys.

For my deep-pocketed and tech-luddite neighbors, this fact probably mattered little. If you have a $10-million dollar home, what’s tens of thousands of dollars? For us, however, it mattered.

Conversely, for the small group of local Crestron dealers, it’s a virtual bonanza.

Rather than conclude (as he does) that the makers of high-tech IOT-enabled products ought to remind their dealers to be less grasping, not to mention criminal, Himler should have concluded that we ought not to buy expensive (or mission-critical) products that have proprietary systems.

Open source, my friend, open source.