I have interesting tales from the trenches to tell. I used to work for a company that did home automation devices. This was quite a few years ago, when the whole craze was in its incipient stages, but I didn't lose contact with it.
I could fill a small book with reasons why IoT products are so bad, but the top reasons would have to be:
1. There is an intense pressure of delivering simply because everyone thinks the market is ripe for the taking and being first offers some kind of guarantee of winning it. Truth is, there is a very significant overlap between people who are interested in this whole IoT crap and people who involved in its development. Most products are so embarrassingly bad that no one in their right mind would want them.
2. Products could be better, but most of them are...
2a) ...developed without any kind of vision, because the management and product design teams don't really understand these things. The vision behind developing most smart home appliances is "we'll make a <insert company's top selling appliance here>, BUT ONLINE".
2b) ...developed by bad engineering teams, because projects are perceived to be too high-risk to be worth investing much into, so they're outsourced somewhere cheap (before you start yelling racism at me, please realize I was one of the cheap guys these were being outsourced to.)
2c) ...seen as little more than platforms for service and/or ads delivery. They see little investment, because management teams completely unfamiliar with hardware design believe the vehicle through which services and/or ads are delivered is pretty much irrelevant and/or can be easily fixed. They treat hardware platforms for delivering ads and services much like they treat web platforms, because that's all they ever built.
3. Standardization in this field is... exaggerated, at best. Even platforms that standardize things at the application layer (e.g. Z-Wave) routinely get it wrong. 90% of the "ground-breaking" gadgets that "open up the exciting world of <whatever> to everyone" only work with five or six phones, at best.
4. The main challenge of every marketing department in this field is coming up with reasons why someone would buy these things. Oftentimes that's done ad-hoc: a device already exists because someone with C in its title had a "strategic vision" and the device is already in beta, and now someone has to figure out how to sell it because the money have already been spent.
5. A lot of big names are in this game pro-actively, in case it actually turns out to be of some value. This is why you see big companies that should know better demoing embarrassing things (like LG's drunken robot). They need to be sure they have a foot in the door in case this actually takes off, but aren't willing to invest the funds needed to provide a serious, integrated system.
6. Testing is virtually non-existent and safety standards are embarrassingly lax. Half of the things that plug into a socket and do fancy Internet things are fire hazards.
7. Virtually every device that does fancy Internet things is a privacy and security hazard. Companies either lack management and development teams that realize how important these things are and know how to build them, or are actively disinterested in fixing them because it's detrimental to their business model.
The true "smart home" won't come until all these funky devices will be integrated in a single system. With everyone competing and raising walled gardens because they don't want to share profits from ads, that won't happen until a big enough player decides to invest the huge amount of money that's needed to create a comprehensive line of devices, that can cover everything from thermostats to sound system.
Until that happens, "smart" homes will be so incessantly dumb and annoying that no one who isn't paid to say they're awesome or build "smart" devices will want one.
Found this one particularly salient: 5. A lot of big names are in this game pro-actively, in case it actually turns out to be of some value. This is why you see big companies that should know better demoing embarrassing things (like LG's drunken robot). They need to be sure they have a foot in the door in case this actually takes off, but aren't willing to invest the funds needed to provide a serious, integrated system.
Many big companies are hedging their bets and playing catch up, which is downright dangerous when you're selling devices that scale up the threat vector for life-critical devices such as refrigerators, security cameras, door locks, thermostats, and cars.
I think Apple has the best shot at winning the connected home game due to their ownership of the iPhone ecosystem (used as a remote for the smarthome), tight product control, and their new marketing story of we are security - and they actually do implement the most rigorous key management and cryptography standards in the industry. I'm looking forward to their next hardware reveal - I think a Siri-integrated router (ala Amazon Echo) would complement their portfolio really well at the moment.
I also expect Apple to be the winner here, but for a very different reason -- they just seem to be the only ones involved in this market that also have the ginormous financial and management services required to pull this off.
The hip startups who sell web-enable smart watches or whatever is trendy nowadays won't come up with the first smart fridge that's actually useful, not because they lack vision or understanding but because they won't be able to build a fridge that doesn't suck in the first place. The SF get-something-through-the-door-quickly development model is fine for stuff that you patch in production, but it can barely produce a working thermostat, a device of barely sufficient complexity to be considered as an engineering diploma project.
I've seen at least five projects ran this way. All of them were utter failures. In some cases, by the time the umpteenth prototype had revealed the correct direction, the market had long moved on or the amount of money and time spent had long outweighed even optimistic sales provisions. In other cases, the first thing that lasted through a fifteen-minute demo without crashing was christened an MVP, but it later turned out to be not quite what was needed because no one bothered doing specifications and studies, so the devil in the details made it a nightmare to use. By the time this was realised, it was too late to change anything anymore and an almost-but-not-quite product got released.
Developing connected appliances is a complicated and expensive business and they require a great deal of interdisciplinary expertise that's very hard to find. It may not seem so, but a dishwasher or a refrigerator worth their money are a lot harder to design and build than the Pebble.
(I should stop eating chips over my keyboard. Half of my past tenses are wrong because I have bread crumbs uner my D key. Crap).
Negatory on Apple winning. I think Amazon is much more likely. They're dominating the connected home right now with the Echo; as a developer, integrating the Echo with Plum's Lightpad is extremely easy, I can't do the same thing with Siri.
> They're dominating the connected home right now with the Echo
Have any numbers to back up this assertion as opposed to sales figures of iPhones, iPads, AppleTVs, Macbooks, AirPorts, etc. - all integral fixtures in the smarthome ecosystem?
> integrating the Echo with Plum's Lightpad is extremely easy
Amazon does not have tight enough control over its smart home ecosystem. While it may be easy for you to integrate your thoroughly designed and tested product, it's also easy for shady vendor x to integrate their cheap, disaster of a product, and Amazon will not expend the resources to vet it, but in the end the user will blame Amazon when that product catches fire because they branded it as OK to work with Amazon products.
Apple doesn't want an outside dev ecosystem building up around its products before its in a position to tightly vet and control what engineers create to enhance the ecosystem. Third party applications/devices are an integral part of the user experience, and by extension, the customer's feeling towards Apple as a brand.
Nope, just anecdata (based on being a startup in the IoT space).
> Amazon does not have tight enough control over its smart home ecosystem...
I don't know that for sure, TBH, though I think the more open and universal platform will win. Currently the Echo is that, it's not an app you have to launch from your phone (Revolv), you just talk to it, and it does things for you.
Echo's superbowl ad also catapulted it, we have emails from people left and right asking for Echo integration (not Apple TV integration).
Also, why would the customer blame Amazon if their bulbs cause a fire? The customer clearly bought the bulbs, then hooked Echo up to the bulb (in the case of Philips Hue), I'm not saying Echo is infallible but I do think your criticism is unfair.
Most of these home automation solutions seem like a step backwards. Manually flipping a switch is fast and usually convenient. Pulling out my phone, unlocking it, toggling a widget or god forbid launching an app waiting for it to connect and send its command sucks. I looked into getting a Clapper as a happy compromise. It turns out they didn't care about safety either. Clappers had a tendency to start fires.
I could fill a small book with reasons why IoT products are so bad, but the top reasons would have to be:
1. There is an intense pressure of delivering simply because everyone thinks the market is ripe for the taking and being first offers some kind of guarantee of winning it. Truth is, there is a very significant overlap between people who are interested in this whole IoT crap and people who involved in its development. Most products are so embarrassingly bad that no one in their right mind would want them.
2. Products could be better, but most of them are...
2a) ...developed without any kind of vision, because the management and product design teams don't really understand these things. The vision behind developing most smart home appliances is "we'll make a <insert company's top selling appliance here>, BUT ONLINE".
2b) ...developed by bad engineering teams, because projects are perceived to be too high-risk to be worth investing much into, so they're outsourced somewhere cheap (before you start yelling racism at me, please realize I was one of the cheap guys these were being outsourced to.)
2c) ...seen as little more than platforms for service and/or ads delivery. They see little investment, because management teams completely unfamiliar with hardware design believe the vehicle through which services and/or ads are delivered is pretty much irrelevant and/or can be easily fixed. They treat hardware platforms for delivering ads and services much like they treat web platforms, because that's all they ever built.
3. Standardization in this field is... exaggerated, at best. Even platforms that standardize things at the application layer (e.g. Z-Wave) routinely get it wrong. 90% of the "ground-breaking" gadgets that "open up the exciting world of <whatever> to everyone" only work with five or six phones, at best.
4. The main challenge of every marketing department in this field is coming up with reasons why someone would buy these things. Oftentimes that's done ad-hoc: a device already exists because someone with C in its title had a "strategic vision" and the device is already in beta, and now someone has to figure out how to sell it because the money have already been spent.
5. A lot of big names are in this game pro-actively, in case it actually turns out to be of some value. This is why you see big companies that should know better demoing embarrassing things (like LG's drunken robot). They need to be sure they have a foot in the door in case this actually takes off, but aren't willing to invest the funds needed to provide a serious, integrated system.
6. Testing is virtually non-existent and safety standards are embarrassingly lax. Half of the things that plug into a socket and do fancy Internet things are fire hazards.
7. Virtually every device that does fancy Internet things is a privacy and security hazard. Companies either lack management and development teams that realize how important these things are and know how to build them, or are actively disinterested in fixing them because it's detrimental to their business model.
The true "smart home" won't come until all these funky devices will be integrated in a single system. With everyone competing and raising walled gardens because they don't want to share profits from ads, that won't happen until a big enough player decides to invest the huge amount of money that's needed to create a comprehensive line of devices, that can cover everything from thermostats to sound system.
Until that happens, "smart" homes will be so incessantly dumb and annoying that no one who isn't paid to say they're awesome or build "smart" devices will want one.