Why Logitech Just Killed the Universal Remote Control Industry
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I had always wondered why no one has been able to solve the ‘too many remote controls’ problem, a clutter a living room of remotes with no ability to figure out which one controls which device. As it turns out, the answer is… a monopoly! A few months ago, I got an email from a professional installer and BIG reader who told me about the company Logitech, a consumer electronics producer. “These remotes,” he told me, “can control a massive array of A/V devices including TVs, cable boxes, disc players, streaming boxes, amplifiers, and more recently IoT devices like lights, blinds, and plugs.”
Logitech’s products are pretty, but the actual quality of the software is terrible, which is the classic sign of a marketing-driven organization run by lazy executives. Logitech is a monopolist in the universal remote control space, which it acquired in 2004 when it purchased a firm called Harmony. “Their market dominance has been ironclad because of their database: they have infrared codes for hundreds of thousands of devices, from brand-name TVs to random HDMI doodads on page fourteen of Amazon. For obvious reasons, they haven’t open-sourced this database.”
