First off I want to state that whenever I find a great piece of software I do buy it. I'm not one of those leech's that suck the life out of a software company by stealing their products.

With that said, everyone knows about the major shift in the big players in the software industry to take care of and sometimes even coddle the developer. They know that if you get into the hearts and minds of the developer they will bring their skills into the organizations and essentially start the sales process for you. Why do you think the MVP membership went from, what 1000 people a few years ago to over 2000 people now? Because it directly effects sales! You build an army, treat they fairly well, and they will fight for you. I'm sure you can see this trend in your own microcosm.

Some of you know that I have my house wired up with the X10 devices. Yes, I'm a geek, my wife knows I'm a geek and knew I was a geek before we got hitched and I can control my living room lights from my cell phone from any place in the world. Sometimes she likes the convenience, but sometimes with the X10 fails me its kind of annoying.

A quick digression..

I have a motion detector outside the main door of our house, which controls the light outside that door as well. Well I think the battery was almost dead in the motion detector and some how the device it started to control was reset back to A1. Well A1 is my fish tank. So for about a week our fish tank would randomly turn on and off. Makes for a fun ghost story to friends, but annoying at 3am when your trying to sleep and a cat wanders by your front door.

Back to my post...

Lately I just haven't been all that impressed with the lack of reliability in the X10 devices. So I wanted to find something much more reliable. Shop around, find a few other products, find out what sort of price range they are in, what devices they can control, and how can I write software to control these devices.

Enter INSTEON. They boast that it is fully compatible with my X10 devices and has great reliability. Looks too good to be true.

It is too good to be true.

They require developers to fork out $100 before you get access to anything. Even their forums are limited to paid customers only. This really sucks for us hobbyist geeks that want to throw a bit of code together in our spare time to control a few lights. No free SDK, no free support.  Ignore the developer.

I decided to email that and ask if this was true. They actually responded quite quickly, under 24 hours, but with bad news. No matter who you are you must pay the $100.

In my humble opinion, having this barrier to entry is going to only slow their adoption down. In fact I refuse to pay them a penny until I can get solid confirmation that it will actually do what I want and need. Is there any sort of C# code which I can stuff into my apps? What does the SDK look like? etc..

Time to dig up some of the other competitors; slow your product adoption.

1 Comment

• Thomas Goddard said Thursday, August 24, 2006 2:00:42 AM

  Hey Rob, I totally feel you there. I feel the same way about Autodesk Maya and recently emailed them about their declining support for developers and the community at large. One of the main reasons that Maya is such a successful piece of software, is/was Alias's history of devotion toward the developer. The companies like film studios, game developers, and any others looking to adopt Maya are also able to create plug-ins, even if they don’t own a licensed copy. It’s when your management staff turns totally non-technical that things start to turn completely user centric. Corporate Bob says “All of that programming stuff is much too confusing for our users.” My philosophy is to partner rapidly and develop with not only the user’s requirements in mind but the developers as well. The developers will help seed your product into new markets and provide solutions for a wider range of businesses. *Big sigh*… Yet another thing to add to the list of things to change in the world ;) I remember when I bought you your first X10 for the Holidays (what was it, 5 years ago?) :)... I am honored to know such a talented developer. Keep up the good posts!!