People struggle with routers because they're terrible. Buggy, inconsistent, and their UI is full of detailed technical questions they don't know the answer to.
I imagine the box of the future is a home cloud box with a small touchscreen on it for the easiest bootstrapping ever. Enter a name and that's the new dynip subdomain and said. Enter a password and that's the password for wifi and for accessing the group shared content online, and the encryption key for cloud backup. Dont ask the user what encryption they want, just set up wpa2.
Physical panel is always admin. Let the panel admin create users and admins with their own credentials for all the usual cloud services - docs, email (at their subdomain), some kind of social networking/IM node, with easy-to-download apps for various other services like minecraft or music streaming or whatever, etc.
I think we are looking at this the wrong way. We are looking at it like techs. These kind of problems need to be looked at from the customers point of view (ok, I know that Facebook users are the product, not the customer but the analogy works)
Ask yourself one question: What problem am I solving with this?
Can you honestly see the Facebook-masses buying a blackbox device, however simple, just to connect to others in a decentralized way? Would your mum use it? That's your target audience.
I firmly believe the future must have a better way of doing things but we need to look at the pain points, the current problems that the current tools are attempting to solve and then coming up with something better and easier (let's keep network effects out of the equation for now).
I don't know what that is but it must be as simple as clicking something that says "Log in to <Product Name>"... not another device, however cool or simple it is.
Perhaps a router that gives you a simple question during setup, e.g. Would you like to enable SocialCloud? A major problem I could see with something like that is that I imagine most people get their routers from their ISP and I have no idea how big the router market is... I got mine from Sky and have no intention of replacing it.
Consider what would happen if you asked the same question about technologies that are popular today before they were popular... What problem does WhatsApp solve? What problem does Instagram solve? What problem does YouTube solve? Instant messaging apps, photo sharing websites and video sharing websites all existed before WhatsApp, Instagram and YouTube, yet they all took off in a big way. Home servers can take off despite the competition so long as there are enough early adopters willing to take a punt. Network effects can kick in after there's a small, dedicated group getting use out of the technology.
> "Can you honestly see the Facebook-masses buying a blackbox device"
They don't have to buy anything. You can run a home server on computing devices you probably already own.
Apple proved your point with Rendevous on Mac OS X. I actually got burned by its easy setup when I bought a Mac laptop for air-gapped use. They used to advertise WiFi as an optional feature, which this ad didn't have. Turns out, it did have WiFi, activated when I turned it on, and Rendevous already had it setup in the background on an open connection. I remember being confused at just how up to date the Apple Store looked. Very, briefly confused followed by eye roll and sigh that an $80 device was already compromised for use case.
Nonetheless, things like it and Time Machine illustrate just how much use one can get out of certain features if the UX is bulletproof or nearly so. Routers might be done as easily depending on the circumstances. I'm almost certain ISP's could pull that off. Give them username and password to use on a HTTPS site that downloads the right configuration into an OpenWRT router they supply with any configuration software built-in. It then prints locally-generated password and other configuration data on form for customer to safely store. Any recoveries can be done with it or through ISP.
I imagine the box of the future is a home cloud box with a small touchscreen on it for the easiest bootstrapping ever. Enter a name and that's the new dynip subdomain and said. Enter a password and that's the password for wifi and for accessing the group shared content online, and the encryption key for cloud backup. Dont ask the user what encryption they want, just set up wpa2.
Physical panel is always admin. Let the panel admin create users and admins with their own credentials for all the usual cloud services - docs, email (at their subdomain), some kind of social networking/IM node, with easy-to-download apps for various other services like minecraft or music streaming or whatever, etc.
Complete 1-stop wifi and cloud server.