Source: The Verge
The smart home market is littered with dead products and abandoned platforms—Philips Hue's decision to kill its cloud service, Amazon's Alexa-dependent ecosystems, Eve's Matter pivot—creating a trust problem that transcends any single device. Consumers are rationally choosing dumb products and closed ecosystems like Apple over open standards because interoperability only works if the companies behind it stay solvent, and venture-backed hardware startups demonstrably don't. The cost isn't the $200 spent on a discontinued hub; it's that each failure pushes the market toward walled gardens, the opposite of what Matter and open standards were supposed to achieve.