SmartLabs Takes a Stupid Pill
There's a simple maxim taught in Business Management 101; Commoditize your complements. That is, whatever other people sell that makes your product more useful should be as cheap and ubiquitous as possible. Selling cars? You want there to be gas stations, tire stores, and map vendors everywhere. Selling soccer balls? You want soccer fields everywhere. Selling software? You want compatible hardware everywhere. Selling hardware? You want others to build lots of software for it.
I recently bought some INSTEON home automation equipment. (Think of it as being like X10, only it works.) If you buy their USB interface device, you can control this stuff with your computer. You can download a freeware app to do the most basic things; all well and good. But it comes with the world's crappiest user interface (see screen shot) that looks like something straight out of the 1970's. "No problem," I think to myself. "I'll just write my own."
Then the fun begins. They'll sell you a development kit for $199. Definitely pricey, but it doesn't have to save me very many hours before it's worth it. But the kicker is their sales agreement: it says right up front that they don't want me as customer unless I agree that everything about how their stuff works is confidential, I won't reverse-engineer it, if I do and learn anything, I'll tell them immediately what I learned and not tell anyone else, and so forth. All of this, even though they have publicly-available white papers describing all of the low-level details of their system. Everything is public except for what goes over the computer's USB interface.
So, what do we have here? As near as I can tell, we have:
- A company that makes its bread and butter selling remote-controllable switches, dimmers, outlets and so forth.
- I'd guess that if you asked one of their executives what their biggest problem is, he'd say that they don't have enough volume to get their manufacturing costs down.
- They publish everything you need to know to compete against them in their core business.
- Meanwhile, they also sell computer interface units. But I'd guess that these count for less than 1% of their revenue.
- They try to carefully control who does what with these interface units.
It's as if they're afraid that somebody might come along and build a better computer interface unit, jeopardizing 1% of their sales. Completely ignoring the fact that more readily available software would probably increase their core business by more than 1%.
Unfortunately, there's nothing unique about SmartLabs here; the same phenomenon repeats itself all over. I've got a Polaroid flat-screen TV, where they absolutely refuse to let me know what the infrared remote control codes are. (I reverse-engineered it, thank you.) I bought a USB FM radio receiver for my car computer, but the vendor doesn't want to let me know how to program it. (It came with yet another crappy app; so far I've partially reverse-engineered it.) I could go on for hours.
Hey SmartLabs et al, here's a clue: People who make your stuff more useful are your friends. You don't need to roll out a red carpet for them, but you should at least not get in their way.