Right now, there are two names at the forefront of standardizing the connected home: ZigBee and Z-Wave. Both are composed of similar wireless networking technologies, and both include languages that allow devices to share select information — such as temperature or whether a light is turned on or off — over their wireless networks. But while each technology has hundreds of products already supporting it, few of those are from major appliance manufacturers, and the modern smart home won't get much smarter until the biggest names all agree on speaking the same language.

Unfortunately, there's no sign that that will happen anytime soon, and some of the industry's top figures don't believe one standard will ever come to dominate.

"I don't," Mark Walters says, "I really don't."

Walters is chairman of the Z-Wave Alliance, the organization that oversees the Z-Wave protocol. Z-Wave’s product is a great option for the home — it's supposed to let every local Z-Wave device talk to each other — but it isn't great for every manufacturer: devices aren’t interoperable worldwide, and it's not truly open to everyone.

"I think … you will see a coalescence around one standard."

Unlike Wi-Fi, Z-Wave is a proprietary system made and licensed by one company. Right now, that means Z-Wave has been able to tightly control how its devices talk to each other — vetting each one to ensure that it can actually speak with the products it’s supposed to — but it could eventually give Z-Wave the necessary weight to keep prices high and control what products can and can't do. Walters argues that being proprietary doesn't really matter. "It's irrelevant in every possible term of the word 'relevant,'" he says.

Of course, Z-Wave's biggest competitor disagrees all around. The marketing director for ZigBee Alliance, the organization that oversees the open standard ZigBee, discounts Z-Wave as even being a true competitor to his system on the grounds that it's proprietary. And ZigBee's CEO, Tobin Richardson, does see one smart home standard eventually winning out.

"You had a number of different approaches and protocols," Richardson says, suggesting that, like how accessories found Bluetooth and computing devices found Wi-Fi, home automation will eventually consolidate too. "I think … you will see a coalescence around one standard." Naturally, Richardson thinks it will be ZigBee, and that wouldn't be the worst news for consumers if it can get appliances working together.

But ZigBee's been having some trouble doing that. Right now, not all ZigBee products can communicate with each other, and that’s a major problem for what’s intended to be a standard. It's a problem that the ZigBee Alliance is working on, and Richardson says it's getting closer to solving. "For the most part [ZigBee devices] are interoperable," Richardson says. The ZigBee standard has been in the making for over a decade, and in that time it's both grown more capable and, at times, more unwieldy. Moving forward, Richardson says, "We will be improving and adapting … so that there is even greater interoperability."