Last week I was browsing for Infrared remote control stuff on remotecentral.com. And well, as a newbie who doesn't have any idea at all how this scene works, I thought I should watch the CEDIA 2007 report from remotecentral. As you'd expect this report is all about universal remote controls.
I actually learned something while watching that. Firstly, that there is a mature industry out there with maybe a dozen players who all are stuck with the share our source code? never!
mentality. And no innovation at all. It's all about growing your slice of the cake instead of making the cake bigger.
They all smile into the camera and show their latest creation, all some contraption with 100 buttons or a software UI nightmare. Let me tell you, dear reader, why there is no innovation going on there. By the way, I don't claim to have any insight into this industry and that's probably why I can see it:
These universal remote controls are like electronic typewriters!
Remember these things? A hundred-fiftysomething years ago, some guy invented mechanical typewriters. That was a real leap in technology, just like the cabled remote control changed the way you used a TV a few decades ago.
Fast forward to the 1990s: Typewriters were perfect. I mean, you couldn't have made them any better, you had all the features that you could possibly have in such a device. It took this industry a long time to get that perfection and I bet that in the end they all went to trade shows proudly demonstrating their newest correction fluid and how many more function
keys they managed to put on the keyboard. So, why is nobody using electronic typewriters anymore, after all it's a convenient and perfect technology?
The personal computer came along and merely as a side effect (my guess is because of the similar input methods) it replaced all typewriters. This wasn't even a leap, writing documents was suddenly a completely different game altogether.
I tried only one universal remote control vendor and it felt like working with a typewriter. This is stone age technology. And the hottest thing we hear about in news today is a shitty software that shows some buttons on an iPhone which mimic one of these stone age remote controls. Except that I can't use it in the dark anymore because there are no buttons to touch.
This is just boring. Just looking at the capabilities of a piece of hardware like an iPhone or iPod touch, I have a dozen ideas how it can completely turn the universal remote control industry on its head. Everyone I talk to says the same; we are currently experiencing a paradigm shift in how people use mobile devices.
I believe that the OpenRemote effort could be a catalyst of that shift, or at least play an important role.
