What if Rain Bird or Hunter buys Rachio?

Has anyone thought about this?
What would happen if one of the majors bought Lil Rachio out. Just to get rid of the competition and to steal such awesome techs for their own R&D.
Would our controllers still work? I don’t think so. Well they wouldn’t work correctly for too long…right?
Just a thought but I bet there’s been an offer thrown on the table a time or two…
Sorry to bring this up…

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This is a risk with pretty much any technology you own. To me, it’s not worth worrying about.

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If they did I doubt they’d shut it down quickly. It’d serve them no positive benefit as none of us would really want to buy their replacement product after being so directly screwed.

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That would be a nightmare I think it was bad enough when Toro took over Irritrol. They ended up making some products that I refuse to use but on the other hand, Toro Precision nozzles are really good.

The controllers from any of the aforementioned companies cannot compare to what Rachio is doing.

The Toro Evolution controller would make most peoples head spin. The Weathermatic controller has it’s issues too. I am not here to bash the comptetion. After installing thousands of irrigation controllers in my life, the last 628 have been Rachio.

Rachio has a good thing going and only getting better as time goes by. :grinning:

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I’m pretty certain of what would happen. Rachio ownership would ‘dance a jig.’ This is the ‘home run’ that companies like Rachio dream of. Ownership would become exceptionally wealthy.

I think there’s some Amazon investment into Rachio, BTW.

Kind regards,

Bill

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Why do you say that? They utilize Amazon AWS for portions of their cloud services, as do hundreds of thousands of other companies…

@tmcgahey, because of this article:

Yea, I knew that…but I originally thought of the Alexa Fund as a grant type “investment” to further the Alexa ecosystem in the fight for home automation dominance, and not Amazon investing directly into companies. Although digging a bit deeper and it seems Amazon does have a track record of acquiring companies involved in this program…so who knows!

Of course any tech can be shut down, the biggest risk with rachio versus the B-Hyve that I also own, is the dependency on the cloud. This is why we always have things like GitHub and Raspberry Pi’s to keep us who can use them more independent, of course with some loss of ease of use.

The IoT is a scary new world, look into the possibility of a hacker triggering all Rachio or B-Hyves to trigger all at the same time. Best to keep your use of IoT Devices to a minimum, as a general rule.

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Amazon bought Ring and so far has not shut it down. As they (Amazon) does not have a competing product it is unlikely they would buy Rachio then shut it down. In fact it would only mean more cash for them (Rachio) which maybe a good thing. On the other hand Amazon also has provided cash to Ecobee and didn’t buy them yet…

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Yet the Ring skill for Alexa is one of the worst and least functional there is. :tired_face:

Putting a positive spin on all of this, what if a company like Google buys Rachio. Well, case in point. They purchased Nest. It would have probably been better for Apple to have done so in my humble opinion. But nonetheless Google bought them. Skip ahead one year, Nest flounders, not much change, skip ahead two years, new products start to emerge, skip to current the product line has grown to a power house. My personal opinion again is any company interested in buying Rachio is looking at a fast step up, not a fast way to kill. I will disclose that I work for Salesforce. I see this behavior. We buy many things when it is about fast development and some other company has the best solution that matches our suite and culture.

Sometimes…the users do win!

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Having used Rachio for several years now and having recently purchased the third generation controller, I would be very upset that I would have bought another “pig-in-a-poke”. My first Rachio was as a result of buying a LONO controller that after a less than lustrous career, folded leaving a bunch of unhappy customers with an electronic boat anchor.
The Rachio controller is phenomenal in comparison and I’m well satisfied, I hate to start down another path that is a potentially lessor product and an additional cost factor.

Why no injection by Rachio? Would like a little reassurance since I’m out here pushing your product to everyone I talk to.

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