For the power user, I don't see much that Matter/Thread offers over Zigbee. The "unified command protocol" is not much of a problem with attentive device selection (and for chinese products there is Tuya) and as for Thread, it's not dramatically better. There were debates around this 4+ years ago, and will be 4+ years from now. The standard is out forever, search any marketplace, you will find that Zigbee/Wifi outnumber Matter devices 10:1.
> There were debates around this 4+ years ago, and will be 4+ years from now. The standard is out forever, search any marketplace
The submission you're commenting on seems to indicate some movement at least, from a very large company that seems to be moderately popular already because of built-in Zigbee support. So if anything, the tides are somewhat turning, but as always with standards, it takes a long time for end-user products to actually appear on the market.
i don't think it does, or that it's even trying to. the problem it's trying to solve isn't the power user who's already got a home assistant server running. matter/thread is for the person who buys cheap smart home products off amazon and ends up with a half-dozen poorly-translated proprietary apps on their phone to manage it all.
Another take: what does it offer companies? They don't really want interoperability. Google, Apple, Alexa are the gravitational forces, and most mainstream devices already support them. Matter makes device maker's platform/own device portfolio aspirations weaker.
for a smart home device company who wants to be the platform by means of vendor lock-in, it offers them nothing. but that's not everybody, and hopefully the companies trying to do that fail.
for companies that make some appliance and don't have aspirations to be a smart home platform, matter and thread gives them an easy way to get their device into the apple or google home apps and check off the "smart" box on the spec sheet without having to build an app and run servers.
