Re: Zigbee: Define "Open" Standard

From: Kelly Hall (khall_at_acm.org)
Date: 01/13/05 

Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 02:45:15 GMT

myren, lord wrote:
> In this slashdot thread, someone mentions that the spec should be
> available sometime Q1 `05 for free. Its currently, what, $7500?

Open means you can get it. Apparantly, you can get it now. Hence it's
"open". It sounds like you're upset about the price. That's a
different issue entirely. Try getting the recipe for Coca-Cola.

$7500 is less than having a certification lab run through FCC, CE, and
UL testing on a product. Based on that, I'd say that the $7500 price is
probably not keeping any serious players out of Zigbee. If the price
drops to something more less, that's great.

> I'm just a hobbyist developer. I looked at Zensys' Z-Wave, but the
> $2500 development kit put me off.

It's partly supposed to put you off. When I worked at ZWorld, the
marketing / sales VP (long since chased off) was rather open about
pricing our dev kits high enough to keep the hobbyists away - his
rationale was that the hobbyists tended to eat up a lot of tech support
time with no high-volume sales to pay for it. In my experience, he was
absolutely correct at the time. Luckily, there are now online support
groups where users can help each other so that the tech support people
can do other things than answering the questions that hobbyists often
come up with.

Not only that, but I would imagine that Zensys needs to offset their
development costs somehow, and the market for Zigbee dev kits is
probably somewhat limited.

Kelly

Relevant Pages

  • Re: VAX software available for download
    ... >> downloads and limit it to hobbyists so that we get access to the kits ... > hobbyists at a decent price, ... Of course there is revenue to loose as you have no idea who is ...
    (comp.os.vms)
  • Re: VAX software available for download
    ... >> downloads and limit it to hobbyists so that we get access to the kits ... > hobbyists at a decent price, ... Of course there is revenue to loose as you have no idea who is ...
    (comp.sys.dec)
  • Re: VAXstation 4000/90
    ... >>based on my own experience in computer stock resellers in Italy it's about ... the price should not be higher than 50 EUR. ... A private owner does not care about ... > especially hobbyists, ...
    (comp.sys.dec)
  • Re: Dont buy
    ... cheapy computer systems. ... What's your price on a full tower system with dual Xeon CPUs, 4G DDR2, ... Still need the price and I'll be expecting FREE overnight delivery and ... And 24/7/365 tech support with a native English ...
    (rec.motorcycles.dirt)
  • Re: Bios
    ... > sell these products and then want to charge you a big price for tech support. ... >>Have you tried del or tab? ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)