That's also what mostly happened in this case. 59 tonnes was sold in the US and bought back in London, 27 tonnes was physically transferred from the US to The Netherlands, and 27 tonnes was physically transferred from The Netherlands to London.
Unfortunately, I share the sentiment. Although I have been blogging weekly for more than 15 years, I have less and less incentives to share my learnings.
I don't know about other European countries (well, I know, but I'm polite), but in France, restaurants will always have salt/pepper and frequently oil/vinegar on each table.
For ketchup, I'm afraid you'll need to stay in the US.
>I use Home Assistant (https://www.home-assistant.io/). It has an integration for lots of manufacturers. Single app, single entry point, cross manufacturer automations.
I use Home Assistant (https://www.home-assistant.io/). It has an integration for lots of manufacturers. Single app, single entry point, cross manufacturer automations.
Home Assistant is well beyond the skills of the vast majority of people to install, set up, and maintain. And they don't want to have to maintain something like that. They want an appliance that they plug in and just works.
Sure. Most people don't have much beneath-the-skin technical inclination at all. We see this right now in 3D printing: Bambu Labs printers are popular because they're simple to use: A person can unbox it, plug it in, load some filament, and start printing widgets from their pocket supercomputer basically immediately.
But it is available as a plug-in appliance, and they're getting better and better at the Just Works aspects all the time.
And in a world where everything is relative, it's a hell of a lot easier to get started with Home Assistant than it is to get started with something like KNX or Crestron.
It doesn't have to be universal or even vaguely popular in order to be successful.
I have all kinds of widgets around me at home that are the products of successful companies of various sizes, and that are so niche that 95% of people would probably never seek to own such widgets themselves. Most probably aren't even aware that widgets like this exist in their universe. But the remaining 5%? They know about the widget, and they want one (maybe more than one).
There's ~149 million households in the US alone. 5% household penetration would require ~7.5 million widgets.
It sure is easy to imagine ways that a person and/or a company can sell just 7.5 million widgets and ultimately be financially unsuccessful, but it's also easy to imagine ways in which that would work out just fine.
But that's just meandering digression. :)
The Open Home Foundation had revenue of CHF 8,836,394 and expenses of of CHF 7,352,798 in FY 2025[1].
Is that small potatoes in a world with trillion-dollar companies? Yeah, it's certainly not ginormous. Is that successful? I personally think that it is.
I have the skills to run HA, and I despise the fact I must use it for any reasonable multi-vendor ecosystem.
I'd much rather have an open version of Apple Home or whatnot, even if I paid for it. I really don't want to spend a bunch of time dicking around with home automation - I want it to simply do what I want it to do.
I have a talk on OpenTelemetry that I regularly present at conferences. After it, I often get the question: "But what's the performance overhead?". In general, I answer by another question: "Is it better to go fast blindfolded or slightly slower with full visibility?". Then I advise the person to do their own performance test in their specific context.
I'm very happy somebody took the time to measure it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_repatriation#France
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