This is an excellent point. Cron has to be one of the most difficult pieces of software to use, and it shouldn't be. When I first heard of IFTTT, I thought it was a joke. I thought: "Who needs these services when I can just spin up a VPS somewhere, write a couple of scripts and get the data I want where I need it"... How silly of me. I don't think my mother would like to take VPS Setup 101, Scripting 101 and Sysadmin 101 in order to have recipes from one website show up in her mailbox every morning.

IFTTT and similar products helps productive people build bridges between services they use in order to further improve their productivity. No need to pay for a VPS, manage it, develop API interfaces, etc... It all makes sense... and if they're able to bring that simplicity to event handling in small devices, then that would be great.