"Turn the heating on before getting in the car to drive there."
I could do it twenty years ago with a phone call... no human was involved and it didn't use the internet either. You don't really needed something connected to someone else's server to achieve that. Remote control is not bad. Remote control through a useless centralized system is - a system that when down will affect a large number of users. In such systems de-centralization is good exactly for this reason, a failure will be limited to the failed system - and won't propagate to thousands of users - and the only reasons it's implemented as a centralized system is to make money from a subscription while snooping data, no user benefits.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
