I believe GE is buying their chips from Philips. Zigbee has almost zero market share.
Lowe's Iris system is an example of someone who perverted Zwave. Insteon had an open system for a couple years and then closed it.
It's too bad we don't see a lot of bulbs based on the ESP8266. It was originally designed to be a light bulb chip and it is rated at 120C. Then the bulbs would speak wifi and not need a hub. It is about $1 in high volume.
Zigbee will be replaced by 6lowpan (ie Google Thread) but I still don't think it will do anything. My preference is for all AC connected devices to speak wifi, and then anything battery powered to be Bluetooth Low Energy. Next version of ESP8266 due in October speaks wifi/BT and it is same price. TI has great BLE chips that will last seven years on a coin cell.
Re: Long history of this
Lowe's Iris system is an example of someone who perverted Zwave. Insteon had an open system for a couple years and then closed it.
It's too bad we don't see a lot of bulbs based on the ESP8266. It was originally designed to be a light bulb chip and it is rated at 120C. Then the bulbs would speak wifi and not need a hub. It is about $1 in high volume.
Zigbee will be replaced by 6lowpan (ie Google Thread) but I still don't think it will do anything. My preference is for all AC connected devices to speak wifi, and then anything battery powered to be Bluetooth Low Energy. Next version of ESP8266 due in October speaks wifi/BT and it is same price. TI has great BLE chips that will last seven years on a coin cell.