Sorry, this is drifting a little off topic but I am loving the conversation. Being European and living in the US for quite some time, I can see the big difference in the legal mentality. That being said... to come back closer to the original topic... Indeed, nobody is immune to cloud service outages and there is a very obvious drift of services and functionalities going into the cloud with little to no value added. The ecobee and nest, both deciding not to provide a local API access are extreme examples. The Vera with their ridiculous "secure mode" is another milder one. With computing power being as cheap as it has become, we have to balance the value of the feature added by the cloud functionality with its reliability. For home automation and control... the value added is near zero. Companies are better off selling slightly more powerful hardware to process everything locally rather than try to cheap out and rely on unreliable cloud services... That's the ST vs. Homeseer model.
