Just before the industry headed into the holidays, and just as we were putting the finishing touches to our article about Ikea joining the Zigbee Alliance, the news broke that Amazon, Apple, and Google had come together to create a working group within the Zigbee Alliance to focus on a new open source standard for the smart home – with no sign of the venerable Open Connectivity Foundation’s involvement. Well, over the break, the OCF has fired back, and while the Zigbee news is promising, we are still stuck in a protracted standards war. The new initiative is called Connected Home over IP (CHIP), and an image from The Thread Group perhaps best illustrates the proposition. In the stack, you…