ZigBee real using

Not an answer to your question, but IMO, ZigBee made some of the same mistakes that Bluetooth and other standards made.

There seems to be a kind of disease that afflicts electrical engineers who devise things like ZigBee, Bluetooth, ISDN, etc. Instead of doing their part, then getting out of the way, letting the software engineers do *their* part, the electrical engineers try to do ALL OF IT in one shot. The result is what one would expect: something that has very nice electrical characteristics and looks like it was done by a professional, but software components that become almost comical as one moves up the protocol stack. In fact, I would imagine that, if the software people were to try to do the hardware part as well as the software part, the hardware would turn out to be just as comical to professional electrical engineers.

I wish some electrical engineer(s), somewhere, would make a new transceiver that avoids the spectrum issues, is FAST, is like Wi-Fi ad- hoc mode in principle, but ultra-simple, uncompromisingly redudced to its othorgonal basis of features, THEN GET THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY!!! :)

*If* this is done, and done right, the hardware people can be almost ! 00% sure that the software people will figure out what to do next.

A little faith is all that is needed, and as a benefit, the specification would lose some weight, perhaps a few hundred pages.

-Le Chaud Lapin-

look at 802.15.4a ;) Anyway - I'm speaking about ZigBee which supposed to be, in the end, the standard for all negotiation between our environment at Home and Office.

My 101 on marketing says that in a "static" market, a closed or proprietary systems do quite well. However in a market that is experiencing growth and has many competitors, then the vendor with the closed system will lose out eventually. Any product that is sold in a growth market needs to be able to be evolve easily and readily. Due to resourcing and expertise (or lack of), a single vendor will usually form strategy business alliances with other vendors (or in the case with Microsoft, just buy the company). Employing a closed system, makes it difficult to leverage on "industry standard" tools and services that may already exists.

In fact many of the original vendors that were pushing proprietary systems, are now also offering their products in a form that are the current "industry standards".

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You probably should have taken the 200 and 300 level followups to that course, because there is a lot more to the situation than you might get from an idealized 100-level course in microeconomics.

Software is a bit different, but observe that Microsoft is a real bad example for your argument, because its lifeblood is proprietary formats and protocols (e.g. MS-Office, NTFS, etc). Further observe that with Windows Vista the PC is steadily marching towards being a "business XBox"; a secret, closed architecture for which you need a license to write any software outside a limited sandbox.

In fact, in most of the target markets that might be interested in Zigbee, the "industry standards" are "whatever the three to five biggest volume purchasers of this equipment want". There is no reason for any of the major players to pay to license Zigbee into their architectures, because the very first thing they would need to do is wrap the data in something proprietary to prevent third-party devices from connecting to the system.