I've been pissed off about the "Internet of Things" for about a year now. It's this buzzwordy thing that people who don't have a clue use to convince people they do. A couple things happened, and I'm zen now. Thing 1 was General Electric calling it "The Industrial Internet." There aren't many less buzz-worthy words than "Industrial." And while calling it "The Industrial internet" Geoffrey Immelt pointed out that increasing the efficiency of jet engines by one percent could save airlines three billion dollars a year. Fuck your toaster's IP address - it makes a lot of sense to put a bunch of sensors on a 40,000 HP bypass turbofan. Thing 2 was this tedious fucking book going all gaga over "the Internet of Things" while at the same time talking to people who were slapping sensors all over stuff. And that's when I realized that The Internet of Things is a phrase used by people who don't understand telemetry. 'cuz that's all we're talking about. Sensors talking to other sensors. That's the 'internet of things.' It's gadgets communicating with other gadgets for the betterment of gadgetry and we've been doing that since the telegraph. I've got a weather station. It's got an IP, a NOAA call sign and a CWOP slot. It's part of "the Internet of things." But it's a weather station. It has all those things because it's useful for it to have them. And that's the thing about telemetry - slapping a sensor on something doesn't automatically make it more useful. There's this notion that 'the Internet of Things' will improve everyone's life by making all of our gadgets talk to each other. This presumes that the gadgets need to talk to each other to be useful, or that a connection will automatically enhance the performance of an isolated gadget. I'm a straight-up gadget freak - there are seven computers in this house, five online. I have a network involving five switches (four unmanaged, one managed - it's complicated). I do a port scan on the network and I find about 20 devices. And while I can control my stereo via a web interface that I can undoubtedly connect to my phone, I like the remote, thanks. It has buttons and doesn't pause its function when I get a text message. That is what's wrong with The internet of Things - it's a mystical title for a mundane reality in order to snow people who don't know any better. An IP-connected thermostat? 'bout fuckin' time. Crestron and Xantech have had that shit since the mid '90s, it was just expensive. That's telemetry with a purpose. Wireless diapers? Fuck that shit.
Sometimes mystical titles for mundane realities are useful. We say "machine learning" instead of "computational statistics" not just because "computational statistics" sounds boring, but because "learning" is the effect we want. Framing it that way makes it easier to see the problems it can solve, because some problems that aren't obviously statistical still make you say "I wish it could just learn to do the right thing here." Likewise, it probably isn't useful for your baby's diapers to talk to your microwave, but a pithy phrase to keep "stuff that isn't computers might want to be networked" in the back of your head can be handy when you come across a pair of things that really do want to talk to each other. The cost is that people who don't know what they're doing can throw the phrase around and sound like they do. I don't know of any jargon that doesn't have that problem.
I agree to a point. "Machine learning" is a way of explaining computational statistics to a group of people that don't understand computation and don't understand statistics. "The Internet of Things" is a way of selling telemetry to people who certainly understand instrumentation and sensors but are suspect of your desire to profit by putting them where they may not belong. 'cuz that's the other aspect of "The Internet of Things" - it implies that machines can't talk to each other unless they've got an IP address. This is true if you want to tie them into 4square or Twitter or Facebook or Google... but even a diaper doesn't need a twitter feed to tell you it needs changing.
I see articles written often about "the Internet of Things," and I agree with you: this is a term that, erm, "plebs" use to describe internet-connected devices (also known as computers). If your electronic device stores and processes data, it's a computer. I'm not sure what's so sure what's confusing about that. Another problem I've seen is people wasting resources on pointless projects related to "the Internet of Things." I don't care if you can use a receipt printer from your iPhone, and anything trying to justify the practicality of such a thing is ridiculous. I'm aware of a little something called "fun," but when people make fun expensive like so many projects related to "the Internet of Things," I can't help but think the money could've been much better spent. Instead of spending on your wristband-controlled Rube Goldberg machine, use the funds to give a kid a book on programming.
I agree that mundane telemetry will be the reality in large part. Unfortunately, the not-so-mundane aspect of that means 'shit that sells your behavior'. The big upcoming battle will be about whether or not we can enjoy the former without suffering the latter. That will probably be the case in the EU. However, on this side of the pond, I have my doubts.
The IoT crowd hates it. It implies that all that telemetry is somewhere you don't have to worry about, empowered and monitored by agencies at great remove from your everyday experience. That's the problem. You can't sell "The Internet of Things" unless you push it like "The Cloud" - this big mysterious idea that masks the mundanity of platform computing and distributed data. I think people are sick of "The Cloud" being used as justification for charging more for a service or demanding greater privacy violations when, in fact, you're talking about email and photos. They haven't gotten sick of "The Internet of Things" yet because its cheerleaders have been careful not to get into specifics. They're quick to point out the Nest thermostat without acknowledging that up until 2012, the most common method of domestic heat control had been essentially the same as that red and white popper on the side of your Butterball. It fucking blew me away that, in 2007, the most common thermostats sold in Home Depot still had bimetallic strips and mercury switches. I'd been tangentially doing building controls for ten years and working with thermocouples for 20... I mean, seriously WTF.
If Douglas Adams had lived long enough to see the era of smart refrigerators he would have a) felt vindicated and b) committed suicide.
This article does a decent job of explaining the big characteristics of what successful products in this area will look like, but interestingly, it doesn't mention (maybe the first) really successful thing that already exists. The Nest thermostat is already a couple years old and it hits literally every single positive point mentioned in the article -- especially that of being a data driven device. I guess my takeaway is that this guy is definitely not wrong, but he didn't say anything new by a long stretch. IMO, he should've stuck with the first thought in the article: any given device is secondary to our ability to make all the devices play nicely. Just like developing for warring browsers has had terrible lasting effects, I think there needs to be a real effort to lay some really basic ground rules for inter-"thing" communication...