“During Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference held in early June, Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, introduced ‘HomeKit’ that’s behind a new Home Automation App coming to iOS 8 later this fall,” Jack Purcher reports for Patently Apple.
“The new app will be able to start controlling smart devices, such as garage door openers, lights, and security cameras,” Purcher reports. “According to Federighi, all you’ll have to do is speak into you iPhone and say the words ‘Get ready for bed”‘ and it’ll trigger Siri to go into action by dimming your home’s lights, lower the thermostat, lock your doors and make sure your garage door is closed – automatically and instantly.”
“Obviously the news of Apple’s HomeKit caught Microsoft off-guard once again. Microsoft’s developer conference, which was held back in April called ‘Build 2014,’ didn’t mention anything whatsoever about home automation,” Purcher reports. “Then after Apple’s announcement, Microsoft quickly launched a new startup accelerator in Redmond on June 18 focused on home automation and the Internet of Things, in partnership with American Family Insurance. Realizing their initiative wasn’t going to attract enough attention quick enough to compete with Apple’s HomeKit, Microsoft has now raced to join the Linux based AllSeen Alliance.”
Much more in the full article here.
Clueless. Still clueless…
When was Microsoft ever ahead in ANYTHING? Being caught off-guard is the company’s policy. And who’s gonna trust Microsoft with anything anymore except fools and IT doofuses?
MS can’t get Windows to work right. Do we expect them to do better with doors, lights and thermostats?
Headless chicken 🐤🐔 playing catchup
MS should just join the All’s Lost alliance and call it quits.
Is that the one that Blackberry is in?
Yes they founded it and Motorola joined next.
Microsoft needs to jump on this alliance before the market moves and they have to get lost on their lonesome ownsome.
All those years ago when we hoped almost beyond hope that Apple might yet out muscle the Microsoft hegemony y striking at its weaknesses no inkling of just how pathetic MS would become ever entered my mind beyond dreams. What a nightmare that company has become.
Well they are hardly begging in the streets for farthings, affecting a limp and hunched over to arouse sympathy. But they seem to have a fog about them that beclouds their thoughts and their very eyesight. You can almost sense them doing the double-take at another firm’s fresh announcements, like an addled uncle intoxicated with his own success at hornswoggling people for thirty years.
Microsoft seems very much a yesterday company, and a fine thing to witness that is. Too bad that many of us must still face the gloomy prospect of working on their unpleasant Windows installlations for years to come.
Only one reason MS has 90% market share. 😛
Only on the PC market and soon this market will be midget market. Mobile is much bigger market. Apple owns the mobile market lion share. It can’t last of course but Microsoft is just a has been company like IBM and HP and Dell.
Mind boggling and Bewildering… They just woke up to the fact the home automation is a real thing?
Ps.. Never the less i like windows… Minus all the virus and security issues .
But I’m a osx person now.. Adjusting to the transition !
Apple is facing some real competition for automating the home. One one hand you have Google who will plaster ads over every device connected to their system. On the other hand you have MS, who will bring the Windows-like crashes to every electronic device in your home.
With this type of competition, Apple could be incompetent and still take market share.
Do I really want to my light bulbs shooting laser beams at me and my thermostat set to 90 degrees during a heat wave because it is running Microsoft’s viral home software?
OT: Speaking of Microsoft, have you seen this bit of untrustworthiness by Microsoft:
Microsoft Insists That No-IP ‘Outage’ Was Due To A ‘Technical Error’ Rather Than Gross Abuse Of Legal Process
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140701/15030927747/microsoft-insists-that-no-ip-outage-was-due-to-technical-error-rather-than-gross-abuse-legal-process.shtml
They should call it “Lights for Sure”.
And when Microsoft’s Home Cloud Servers drop they can rebrand it “Lights Out”.
Msft running software for home systems like smoke alarms…
remember the oil rig Deepwater Horizon Disaster in the Gulf?
one of the causes were safely alarms were tied to ‘blue screened’ PCs.
computerworld:
“A computer that monitored drilling operations on the Deepwater Horizon had been freezing with a “blue screen of death” prior to the explosion that sank the oil rig last April, the chief electronics technician aboard testified Friday at a federal hearing.
In his testimony Friday, Michael Williams, the chief electronics technician aboard the Transocean-owned Deepwater Horizon, said that the rig’s safety alarm had been habitually switched to a bypass mode to avoid waking up the crew with middle-of-the-night warnings…. The machine had been locking up for months, Williams said, producing what he and others on the crew called a “blue screen of death…. With the computer frozen, the driller would not have access to crucial data about what was going on in the well.”
Why is Microsoft always caught off guard? I’m guessing that they just sit on their asses all day waiting on someone else to come up with great ideas.