Most manufacturers of smart home products just aren't trying right now. They're going for the lowest hanging fruits with lights and switches, most of which take more effort to toggle on your phone than to just tap the wall. Home automation will take off when people stop focusing on "sexy" automation and start making serious and boring products. Nest has a good start with their thermostat and being able to set your status as home or away to save on heating and cooling costs. From there a valve for my water heater would be the next big step forward, making sure I'm not heating 30 gallons when no one is around to use it. Also, in the winter, the automated unit can pump hot water at night or drain the pipes to make sure there's no bursts. Outlets are next, cutting off power to constant power draw electronics when I'm off on vacation. After that, irrigation systems that can check the recent weather and soil saturation to make sure my garden isn't over or under watered. There are dozens of great ways to use home automation, but the big producers are too busy making lights that can be any color to create them.
I disagree wholeheartedly. X-10 is nearly as old as I am, and has been continuously available the entire time. It has been possible to control your thermostat via "the Internet" since the era of acoustic couplers. The parts were available at Radio Shack. Anyone capable of programming a garage door opener is capable of programming X-10. Yet its penetration has always been minimal, its users the lunatic fringe. Nests sell because they have an app and they look sexy. For what they do, they're preposterously expensive. Timed thermostats have been available at every hardware store in the country for over 20 years and are about as difficult to program as a garden timer; now that Honeywell has seen that some upstart can charge $250 for a bells-and-whistles thermostat with blue LEDs, they've got an entire line of bells-and-whistles thermostats with blue LEDs. All it will take is for a Chinese company to decide they'll take 1% profit margins rather than 100% and the things will be $60 like they oughtta be... and then we'll all have thermostats we can control with our phones. It won't change the fact that any given thermostat has three connections - heat on, cool on, fan on. There isn't a lot of "smarts" necessary. If you work a normal job, a simple schedule will do ya. Going out? Hit the "hold" button. There's a reason homes aren't "smart" - there isn't a lot of "smarts" necessary. Your water heater example: completely sorted with a tankless, which is what most new construction is going to. They don't rot after 5 years, they don't sit there streaming excess heat into the closet and they don't take up more room than the dishwasher. Smart outlets? How is the outlet going to know that the wall wart driving your phone charger is lower priority than the wall wart driving your Tivo? Or your Wifi? Which keeps everything else working? Your irrigation system already works that way, by the way. Check it out. It comes down to this - consumers say "I don't just want chips on things, I want stuff that will actually improve my life." Vendors say "We've been selling that shit since nineteen diggity two." Then consumers say "Oh. Well... I was just making conversation. I don't actually, like, need any of this shit." and the vendors go "We know. That's why our sales on telematics run a fraction of everything else. But we're happy to watch Samsung try to get you to buy a microwave with an email server every third CES show."
Do you happen to know a good(ish) book on the Internet of Things / telematics that doesn't suck? I've read the Age of Context and on my list is The Zero Marginal Cost Society by Jeremy Rifkin, but he seems like an asshat. I've got an assignment on harbor logistics and I'm gonna write the part that talks about IoT (and why it's a nonsensical buzzword), but I'm looking for a book or two to back me up.
I don't. I don't think you'll find one - again, I maintain that "the Internet of Things" is just a buzzword rebranding of telematics to put it in terms that people who are afraid of Latin roots can understand. Age of Context was bullshit. I put that crap down the minute Scoble describe Google Glass as a "world-changing technology."
In my example, it's more about all the parts of the home working together and "just working". Yes these things have been on the market for a long time, but they either require and intimidating amount of programming (that is, some programming) or they don't have perceived intelligence (my thermostat schedule doesn't adjust to my sick days). I think if someone could create an affordable smart home suite that "just worked" it would be more enticing than the other current solutions. I also think this is what nest is working towards.
Here's my objection: You say, "It would be great if it worked like this." I say "It does work like this. Has done for decades. Nobody cares." You say "But it doesn't work like this." This is the part where I say Look. The difference between a Nest and this is $230 worth of hipster bullshit. I say this having hated on how primitive and stupid thermostats are for going on 20 years. I actually rigged one very similar to this example to act as a dayparting timer for background music in a large chain of restaurants - the cheapest way for me to switch between two sources in over 2,000 restaurants was rigging the thermostat Macgyver style to do what I needed it to do. Its not that they're really versatile, it's that they're really fucking simple. But hipsters are scared of things involving screwdrivers, and in love with things involving wifi, so yay. $250 thermostat. It doesn't "just work", it has to "learn" your behavior. Fuck you, Nest. Turn on when I tell you, turn off when I tell you, and go for the temperatures I decide. See, that's the part they don't really explain - you have to fuck with a Nest for about two weeks before it does its magic, while my $20 buddy is in the zone within ten minutes of me slapping it on the wall. And remember - three wires. Same three wires the Nest needs. You wanna see innovative? here's innovative. Fuck your thermostat, I wanna know what all the power in the house is doing, and I want to know from everywhere. Except that isn't innovative either. I think TED is a 3rd or 4th generation whole-house monitor. But since it's basically a scaled-down industrial energy monitor, rather than "the Internet of Things", and since you need to know how to change out a circuit breaker to use it, the hipsters aren't eating it up. "Just working" means "but I want bells and whistles!" or "but there isn't enough hype!" THAT is what separates Nest from its competition - bullshit Kickstarter eMasturbation "sentiment." And again - we do this every ten years.
Yeah, there is a market of people who don't want to change their circuit breaker and still want the benefits of controlling their home energy. You can dismiss them but they aren't going away, and they seem to have cash in hand for more energy efficient homes. So companies can go in, in our simplified universe, one of two ways. The first tact is yelling "fuck you you hipster piece of shit, we built what you're talking about 20 years ago and if you really wanted what you're talking about you'd bring yourself to my level." The second tact is building the thing that people seem to be asking for. I know that all of these things exist and work. I know that this is nothing new to you. But if I'm making these devices then fuck you, you're not my target market anyway. Instead, I'm going to focus on those hipster pieces of shit. I'm going to build a "learning thermostat" that your program to your actions. That has a motion detector that can tell if you're home and the house should be heated or cooled off schedule. That looks futuristic and cool, because even if they don't want to admit it, that matters. And when I have that product built, I'm going to build lights that can use those motion detectors to turn off if no one's in the house. That can not use the water heater, when someone wants to save money without going tankless. That can Know when an outlet should be drawing power and when it shouldn't be. Yeah, you can do these things because you give enough of a shit to go out and learn it. Everyone else can't say the same thing. That's who they're building for.
And again, here's my objection: those people don't exist. "Energy efficient homes" is a mature market segment. You'll find that most power districts will throw incentives at you like they're made out of money for going energy-efficient. City of Seattle will pay half of a front-loading washer, for example. Need new windows? Have a tax credit. Wanna go tankless? Have a 40% cash rebate. Not to mention all the CCFLs distributed by every power company under the sun. That shit's super easy and it's completely seamless to the consumer. Not only that, but you're either selling to people who are comfortable going to Home Depot or you aren't. If you aren't comfortable going to Home Depot, sure, buy your Nest off Amazon. Lookithat. They got 'em prime. Right next to them, of course, they've got the Honeywell for $100 less, and it includes that all-important picture of a female hand model holding an iPhone with graphix comped in. If you are comfortable going to Home Depot... And thus the problem. Home Depot will absolutely sell you a Nest. They'll sell you a Honeywell. They'll sell you cheap chinese blister-packed thermostats for $19. And if you're comfortable going to Home Depot, you're comfortable asking Home Depot "hey, how hard are these things to put in?" and Home Depot will say "easier than a light switch because you don't even need to turn off your breaker. Do you have HVAC? no? Then there's literally two wires and the polarity doesn't even matter." Yeah - the Nest is a darling of the tech industry right now. Yeah - it's a lot less ugly than that which came before. And yeah - it's going to have a lasting impact on the market. Just like when the iPhone came out: all of a sudden it wasn't cool to have your phone be ugly as fuck. Gizmodo called it "the Jesus phone" and they were right (even though it didn't have copy and paste) and it radically changed the landscape for handsets. But the iPhone also changed the functionality of phones. Multitouch was a big deal, and allowed you to actually use the thing with your thumb. An App Store that didn't suck was a revelation. A handset you didn't have to spend the weekend doing registry hacks on in order to use? Marvelous. The Nest is a thermostat. It even looks like an antique Honeywell. Talk about skeuomorphism - the design of the gadget above is a consequence of bimetallic strips and mercury switches. The Nest adds what, exactly, besides that non-denominational "fuzziness" of its programming and an app for that? Which isn't a problem except that once you've put in a magic thermostat, you've let the magic out. Your comprehension of its cleverness is predicated on your lack of understanding. So your market segment is basically - people with money - who don't understand technology - but are attracted to it - and are interested in home improvement - but not so interested that they'll visit a home improvement store. My whole house monitor? Sold through the exact same channels as X-10 shit. Home hobbyists have been dinking with this stuff for decades and that's not going to change. The difference is, Wall Street is going to forget about them (again, for the nth time) when the "Internet of Things" doesn't translate into revenues.
You're really over-complicating the market segment description. It's simply people with money who are attracted to technology. And they certainly don't consider a thermostat swap as a "home improvement project". Home improvement projects to them are putting in a hardwood floor, new countertops, or painting the walls. Like it or not, understand it or not, agree with it or not, there is a whole class of consumer that will happily fork over $250 for the ability to turn the heat on without getting out of bed, and more importantly to them have guests comment on the "cool looking gadget on the wall". Hell, some of them might even be programmers (loud GASP!). Say it isn't so, Joe. Understanding technology has nothing to do with it. If those people don't exist then who the hell did Nest sell al their devices to? What you are missing is that there is absolutely a class of consumer that wants all of the bells and whistles you and I don't value. They don't give a shit that there are cheaper altenatives available with the same core features and same easy installation process. They are likely very aware they are simply throwing their dollars at the aesthetics of the product. I wish I had disposable income for this kind of stuff. My furniture collection and wall art would be quite different I assure you. Besides, the Honeywell Smart thermostat is a better bells and whistles match to the Nest than the base programmable you linked to, so with an honest comparison it's really only $70 worth of hipster bullshit not $230.
How many Nests have you seen? I've seen one. It belonged to a team manager at Space X. You missed the fact that this 'class of consumer' precludes the individuals doing stuff like this for the past 20 years without needing to spend $230 on a Honeywell analog. You've got your opinion, I've got mine; mine wasn't delivered with immediate, condescending snark. So the next time you try to have a conversation with me, you'll know why you can't.
There's an argument to be made that you need to ease the consumer market into a new functionality. Solitaire was put on early home computers to teach people how to drag and drop, for example. In this case, get people used to the idea of 'controlling your home from a distance' with something very easy such as lights and heat, then we progress to the more complex stuff like detailed HVAC/plumbing/environmental controls.
I don't want a tweeting toaster, but as with all the tech we rely on, people who aren't too cool for it will hang in there and make Things that do improve our lives. I do want my doors to unlock when I drive up. I want the lights downstairs to turn off when I go upstairs, or to be able to turn them off with my phone when I lie down and don't want to get back up. I want a robot to vacuum my floor, when that works better. I don't want the Amazon button, but I do want a fridge that knows I'm low on milk and orders some more of whatever is cheapest.
So far, I think the commenters missed what's really going on: The Internet of Things will eventually be used by AI to communicate to manage all production and distribution....or not.
I see it less as an Internet of pointless things and more as appliances of pointless options. An oven I can start remotely doesn't interest me; I'm not likely to leave my dinner in a room temperature oven for nine hours while I'm at work. The same is true of wet clothes in the laundry. But at the same time, a status check would be great. Confirming the stove is off or how many minutes are left on my laundry would be nice. So what I think will happen is manufacturers will add internet connectivity, and then the rest is just cheap software. I'll get my status stuff, but it will come with a thousand other options I couldn't care less about.
I have a friend that owns a marketing company. They've recently rebranded themselves as the marketing compan for the "Internet of Things." -game on.
Your friend should diversify. This was the "smart home" ten years ago and "home automation" ten years before that and "the future home" ten years before that. Small fortunes have been made out of large ones in the attempt to saddle the consumer with superfluous telemetry.
I am sure that it's a lucrative market for a marketing company. It's pretty clear that you have companies that have a lot of work cut out for them selling the idea to consumers. I think any appliance that doesn't do exactly what I want without minimal effort is rage inducing, and I have yet to find any 'anticipation' software aside from Google's instant search that doesn't make the experience worse.
Google Now is convinced I need to know the weather of a gig I was at for a month over a year ago. Google Now gives me more information on searches I've already run. Google Now gives me useless data about concerts I'm not going to, sporting events I don't care about and traffic on roads I don't drive. Google Now is a whingey, repetitive attempt to get me to look at ads from a company whose ad revenues are plummeting.
See I don't get any of that. Wake up in the morning, estimated commute time and traffic report complete with weather. Do a shazam search, and get a little blurb about the artist and a youtube link to the song I searched a few days later once I've forgot about it. Stock updates on the few that I'm interested in (And several that I don't. Search for A lululemon quote ONCE and I'm interested in the financial aspects of yoga pants FOREVER) And top it off with cards about various rehearsals/appointments/etc delivered in a timely fashion. Our mileage seems to vary a LOT. I use Nova Launcher too, but I've only nixed applications that use my mic without telling me first.
It probably comes from the fact that I've evaluated Google to be a clumsy and useless tool for all but the most surface-level investigation. - Wake up in the morning and any given morning doesn't have the same commute. Most have no commute at all. Weather? I am KCAPLAYA2. Google gets its weather from me. Traffic report? This is Los Angeles. Traffic is entirely predicated by Waze, which Google bought, which fucked it up for everyone. - I use SoundHound because it works better, gives me lyrics, gives me iTunes and Play links, and keeps a running tally of everything I've ever asked it for. And since I ask so rarely, that's a dozen links in three years. - Stock research is handled entirely in platforms other than Google. If I'm googling a stock, it means I'm on someone else's computer. - I subscribe to and maintain eight different calendars, only three of which are mastered by me, through four different gmail addresses. Google Now doesn't have the first fucking clue what to do with that, so it tends to tell me about the birthdays of people who follow me on Google Plus, whom I largely don't know, and who are stalkers that I've blocked. Google Now strikes me as a life-simplifier for people with extraordinarily simple lives.
I'd argue that those side streets are underutilized and shifting traffic to them lightens the load on the main thoroughfares enough to be a net benefit. But every driver should be considerate of the context of the road on which they're driving, speeding through residential streets and gliding through stop signs isn't ok anywhere.Traffic is entirely predicated by Waze, which Google bought, which fucked it up for everyone.
I'd argue that otherwise-sane individuals can be cruising down the far left lane of the 405 at 30mph and then Waze says "take the next exit" because that side street is, at this very moment, capable of supporting 33mph. And you can watch them - and I do - immediately cut across four lanes of traffic so they can swoop down to take an already-crowded exit so they can mush through surface streets for one exit and swoop back up on an equally crowded on-ramp. And in the meantime, they're causing accidents as people who do whatever their phones tell them to do are suddenly shocked out of their texting, spotify-listening reverie to fuck up traffic for the rest of us. I'll go one further. Google Maps doesn't default to "avoid toll roads." So a buddy of mine decided he'd take the 110 up from Long Beach into Burbank because Google told him it would be fine. And then he got on the 110, realized he didn't have a traffic pass, dug around in the settings (while driving - an Audi, I might add, to add to the stereotypes) and discovered that actually, his 33 minute drive was going to be 94 minutes. Either that or he could pay $26 in fees and a $25 ticket. There may be places in the world where Waze isn't the antichrist. I'll bet it'll get you around Israel just fine. The one time I used it (in that black period when Google didn't have an updated Maps for iOS and we were stuck with Apple Maps) it A) couldn't find the address B) sent me on side streets for candy C) invited me to interact with the fucking thing the entire time in a municipality where fucking with your phone while driving is a $500 fine. So you can argue that those side streets are "underutilized." But I'd argue that SIDE STREETS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE UNDERUTILIZED and that when we're accepting that apps are permitted to destroy neighborhoods, we can no longer bitch about any horrific thing our pocket toys do to us.
What are the stereotypes about Audi drivers? (I ask in all innocence as a European Audi driver - here they're just standard mom vehicles).while driving - an Audi, I might add, to add to the stereotypes
My impression (could be wrong) is that they're slightly-richer-but-similar-to-BMW-drivers. But what do I know? I drive a Saab 900 (classic, 'cause I'm a dirty old hippie).
I think our equivalent would be the Italian sports car crowd? Here, Audis are in the sensible middle-class category, along with VWs, Volvos and, in fact, Saabs! I love Saab 900s. My best friend's very cool rock star father drove one when we were kids, and I thought it was the absolute height of chic.
I'd buy that for a dollar with one small addendum, because things can be plenty complicated without being digitally complicated.Google Now strikes me as a life-simplifier for people with extraordinarily simple lives.
for people with extraordinarily simple digital lives.