Comment by paxys

As with so much technology, the technology exists in part to provide a service to the customer, but more and more it exists to direct the customer into the behaviors desired by the technology owner and its advertising partners. This isn't always so evil or insidious, but the point stands that Netflix (or almost any modern service) doesn't want you to do what _you_ want with your devices. It wants to direct you towards whatever is most beneficial to Netflix. These companies don't really serve their customers, except confusingly, customers keep paying for these services.

there was an ad, or a presentation in a conference keynote, from when microsoft built phones, showing a user leaving the house and continuing what was he doing in the car in a very futuristic way. I can't find it now, but was something crazy by then, the continuum idea was also a good one, but here we are, walled gardens and nothing smart about them.

Abolishing copyright and patent law would pretty much solve this.

It's notable that often we have protocols to tie things together. UPnP/DLNA/Miracast have existed for a long time now & have included standards for media playing, light control, others. And many TV's have even implemented!!

I feel like what has always been trickier is control and coordination. There haven't been many people to step up and own the higher level, the thing that coordinates devices.

It's notable to me that recent successful cast protocols (like Netflix+YouTube's original DIAL, Chromecast) have really simplified. Are bottom up flows. They have allowed the phone (second screen) apps to have a direct way to cast, inside the app. To one other screen, to such an extent that multi-room audio works by first making a group that then presents in the app as one device. (Sonos' proprietary casting is the notable exception.) Where-as historically casting was possible but often used dedicated apps, a UPnP Control Point, that talked to a different UPnP Media Renderer to point it at various UPnP Media Servers. A tri-part system, with control as the third point.

Netflix hypothetically could have used the UPnP to do casting. Phone acts as a Media Server (but serves up one-time-use URLs on the net for actual media) to the movie on question. Then act as a UPnP control point to control media playback. But they made DIAL, which reduced it to a two system network. And to have more resident native apps running (with rest channels open between the devices).

It's interesting seeing what folks do with Google Home and Home Assistant. Orchestrating routines and triggers and what not is kind of neat, in some ways wildly hard to imagine from "back then", but also feels so short in other ways. Is such a primitive level of control. It feels like the task of making actual systems coordinateable and orchestrateable, the real dream of ubicomp, is indeed quite far away, unowned, even though in many cases we have advanced computer protocols afforded to us.

It's interesting to look back at the times when these concepts and sci-fi lit were written.

A lot of it was in the postwar period. You had a booming population that offered the opportunity for easy corporate revenue growth. If you wanted to make more money, you just sold your good or service to a person who didn't have it yet. That was simple enough because there were people - a lot of them - aging into your market. Let's say that the microwave was the smart home appliance of the late 60s/early 70s. You want to sell them. Well, that's easy, because there are a bunch of people building first homes who want to update their kitchens. Make the case that your microwave belongs in it due to the convenience it brings.

You're a futurist. What would that microwave look like in the future? Well, surely it would just be purchased, you'd put it in your home, and it'd have all sorts of features to make your life even more convenient.

These stories were written with the assumption that, at least in the West, that would continue forever. The Baby Boomers would have enough kids to justify the same sort of marketing strategy. And then those kids would have enough kids. And so on and so forth.

That didn't happen. The birthrate began to plummet in the 1970s and hasn't increased meaningfully since. There are fewer people naturally aging into your market, to say nothing of resources becoming more scarce as time goes on.

So what do you do if you are charged with providing shareholders ever-increasing returns on their investments by selling goods and services? Well, you try to extract more sales - or value - out of a smaller number of people. You don't just sell a smart home device; you require it to be tied to a subscription that must be paid monthly, and make the person using it buy a new one every so often to keep the revenue coming in. You could also collect the data on how they use the device and sell that to people looking to influence the purchase of further goods and services.

The microwave is now a "smart" device that will do all sorts of things... but you'll need to keep paying for it, over and over.

Same with music players, lighting fixtures, televisions, laundry machines, and everything else we've seen get the "smart home" treatment.

Growth must be maintained. Value must be created. The futurist never took into account that part. It was about the consumer, not the supplier, but the consumer can only be made to consume so much based on organic growth.

Any vision of the future that doesn’t include realistic incentives of human beings won’t happen.

Offering such a flexible smart home requires a huge amount of coordination work, customer support, and just taking the blame sometimes for the inevitable bugs.

Yeah competent companies are willing to take on all that, if you pay them a lot, which is why high end smart homes are flourishing.