Re: Looking at Zwave products and need recommendations?

["Dean Roddey" <droddey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Oh, I wasn't asking them to give me any support at all. I just wanted the
documentation I needed, that's it. If they would take a couple days and
write it down correctly they wouldn't have to provide any more than trivial
support to companies like ours looking to support the product. They are
completely oriented towards hardware OEMs it seems to me. They really put no
thought or effort into being supported by automation systems. And that would
include big automation systems as well, not just smaller fry like us.

If, instead of trying to charge thousands for the right to support the
product, with the reason being they would have to provide lots of
hand-holding support (something that no other company we work with seems to
have a problem with, since they understand it's an investment in market
development), they would just have documented it properly, then it wouldn't
have cost them hardly any support, and we could have gotten support in place
quickly and correctly far earlier on. Ok, that was the run-on sentence from
hell, but hopefully the point got across. Basically, they created the
hand-holding requirement by not doing the tiny bit of work required to
document how to do it right.

Literally, what it would have taken to make this happen would have been
three pretty small documents on the protocol and a little overview (already
part of the overall SDK), about a 10 page writeup of the issues specific to
an external control system (the big missing part), a good sample program
(they provide a pretty useless one), and the headers (already part ofthe
SDK). They could have passed that out to every vendor like us who wanted to
support it and left us to our own devices and any competent company could
have provided good support with no support, or at most a couple of e-mails
that some mid-level engineer could have fielded.

-------------------------------------
Dean Roddey
Chairman/CTO, Charmed Quark Systems
www.charmedquark.com

"Robert L Bass" <sales@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:eaofh1dmvm5m0fls6dk7p49p9s41pkv0qb@xxxxxxxxxx
> Dean,
>
> You're certainly right that had they decided to take the route
> you would prefer their product would enjoy more support from
> small developers.  However, they have apparently taken the other
> approach and for good reason.  If they concentrate on developing
> relationships with Microsoft, Intel, GE and the like, they are in
> a very strong position to grab a major portion of the marketplace
> and do it quickly.
>
> OTOH, if they devote time to folks like you (no disrespect here;
> I think you're on the road to major success), they will have less
> resources to devote to the industry big boys.
>
> Fortunately for a soon-to-be-significant segment of the DIY
> community, you've managed to get past the SDK hurdle and write
> your own module.  Homeseer isn't a big player yet but they are
> well on the way.  They have more capital so they bought the SDK
> and got the support with it.  Either way, two more vendors are
> now supporting Zwave.
>
> Best of luck with CQC.