The manufacturer should make a commitment to open source all the code necessary for the community to get it working locally on a LAN without any of that cloudy goodness. Why?
(1) As other posters have pointed out, there's no guarantee that they won't go out of business or drop support in the future. If open drivers are available, it's all good.
(2) As I've long said in relation to nVidia's dragging their feet on releasing open-source graphics drivers: IF YOU'RE A HARDWARE COMPANY, THERE'S NO REASON NOT TO OPEN-SOURCE YOUR SOFTWARE. If you're a company like MSFT and software is all you sell, obviously you can't open-source your products, because then why would anyone ever pay you anything? OTOH for a hardware maker, THE SOFTWARE IS USELESS WITHOUT THE HARDWARE. If this is even marginally popular, people will hack on the software, and the better the open software gets, the easier it is to sell hardware. Essentially the community is giving away their development resources for free.
(3) The above may not apply if they're selling the HW at cost or even a loss, expecting to make it up on subscriptions. That's simply a pricing/marketing problem: Merely increase the unit price until selling the HW is profitable, and include a code for a free year or two of the online service. Or give progressive discounts for people who sign up for quarter/half/one/two/three/five years when they buy, to encourage purchases.
(4) I hate it when my personal information's floating around out there in the cloud. Electricity usage data could be useful for burglars or stalkers to see what times nobody's home during the day, when you turn out the lights at night, if you might be on vacation because no appliances have run for days...I really hope the data feed uses SSL.
(1) As other posters have pointed out, there's no guarantee that they won't go out of business or drop support in the future. If open drivers are available, it's all good.
(2) As I've long said in relation to nVidia's dragging their feet on releasing open-source graphics drivers: IF YOU'RE A HARDWARE COMPANY, THERE'S NO REASON NOT TO OPEN-SOURCE YOUR SOFTWARE. If you're a company like MSFT and software is all you sell, obviously you can't open-source your products, because then why would anyone ever pay you anything? OTOH for a hardware maker, THE SOFTWARE IS USELESS WITHOUT THE HARDWARE. If this is even marginally popular, people will hack on the software, and the better the open software gets, the easier it is to sell hardware. Essentially the community is giving away their development resources for free.
(3) The above may not apply if they're selling the HW at cost or even a loss, expecting to make it up on subscriptions. That's simply a pricing/marketing problem: Merely increase the unit price until selling the HW is profitable, and include a code for a free year or two of the online service. Or give progressive discounts for people who sign up for quarter/half/one/two/three/five years when they buy, to encourage purchases.
(4) I hate it when my personal information's floating around out there in the cloud. Electricity usage data could be useful for burglars or stalkers to see what times nobody's home during the day, when you turn out the lights at night, if you might be on vacation because no appliances have run for days...I really hope the data feed uses SSL.