5 Big Problems with IoT

It seems everyone is talking about the Internet of Things, more commonly referred to simply as IoT.  It has overtaken “cloud” as the biggest buzzword in tech.  But while there have been some very big, very public early successes, from the Nest home thermostat to the Disney MagicBand to name only two, the IoT suffers from some pretty big problems.  This is the first of a series of pieces about the state of the IoT.  The goal of these pieces is to help people navigate through some of the hype and hoopla so they can better understand why, or if, they should care about IoT, and in that context, how urgently they should be doing anything about it.  I will lay out five core issues with IoT and the next five pieces will delve more deeply into each with specific thoughts on how to solve each specific problem.

1. It’s Just a Horrible Name. In 2009, Mary Tripsas wrote an article in The New York Times “It’s brand new but make it sound familiar” and in that article, she pointed out that automobiles didn’t sell at first because no one understood why they would want one. It wasn’t until it was named the “horseless carriage” that they got the context of what it replaced. While Internet of Things is technically an accurate term describing the fact that machines can now communicate with other machines in much the same way humans interact with the internet, IoT is still too abstract for many people to understand the use cases that might apply to them – or where there might be opportunities for new businesses. At least the notion of putting your data in the cloud conveys the fact that data and computing power exist in what is for you a non-physical ether-like space. While I am not going to tell you I have the perfect name to replace IoT, Robert Scoble’s book Age of Context, which I will admit I first overlooked in large part because of the title – context is one of the words that is missing from IoT, as is the word experience. There are many examples on the piece about the name – so stay tuned for that.
2. Way too tech focused. Sure, the things that are possible under the umbrella term IoT would not be possible without technology, but again, whereas “cloud” has a common thread in its meaning across all uses, IoT encompasses a vast array of technologies, and technological possibilities so as to almost make the term too big for its own good.   Yes it can be real time location services, yes it can be reminders to take your daily medication, yes it can tell you whether or not your heat is on, but there isn’t yet enough of a unifying element to all of these use cases to make it simple enough for many of us to explain to our parents or our young children. And we need that. At the risk of being ironic, the larger piece about this point will delve into several examples of the technology developments behind the term IoT, in large part because point #3 is all about the business opportunity side.
3. Business opportunities are often non-obvious. By now many of us have heard about dirty oil or “oil sands”, the gist of which is that it has been known for a very long time that there is oil in Canada that’s full of dirt – and unless the price per barrel of oil is greater than some specific number, it’s not cost effective to go get that oil.  Until recently the price of oil was very high, so it was an easy decision to go to work on the oil sands. That opportunity has been out in broad daylight, even known to people like me who have nothing to do with the oil and gas industry. The opportunities for IoT are, in most cases, much less well known and even less obvious. That’s partly because technology is moving so fast, many people are unaware of how cost effective some things have become – their “oil sands” opportunity might be right in front of them and they may not be aware of it. The piece on this point gets to several examples of what I call trajectories of opportunities intend to help unmask some of the opportunities that are emerging right now.
4. Not a one-size-fits-all solution. While there are some solutions that amount to an IoT solution “in-a-box”, for now these solutions remain fairly expensive for organizations to implement. Kite Solutions is the name of an early stage company that is somewhat a match dot com for big companies looking for the right little company to help them with brand-aligned innovation. I don’t know if Kite will expand to help companies find the right IoT people/technology/company for them – but it wouldn’t surprise me, and that’s sorely needed. This piece breaks out some classes of opportunities that are emerging to help people better understand navigating the build versus buy decision – and in some cases just sit and wait for now.
5. Shift too big for the big guys. If you look at a company like Cisco, they started out as a pure hardware company. Today they describe themselves as a software company and they are trying to play catch up with the likes of IBM and Microsoft in figuring out selling and tracking licenses as companies shift from paying for perpetual licenses to software as a service (subscription based), or SaaS. But Cisco still has a lot of hardware people leading this shift to being a software company, and hardware people have very different DNA compared to software people. So when you look across at what amount the Mount Rushmore faces of high tech – Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and some others, not only do they need to pivot to position themselves for success in IoT, they are going to inject some new DNA if they want to stay a face on Mount Rushmore. Careful mergers and acquisitions will be a key to success for this, but there is more to it than that, and this piece explores that in greater depth.

So stay tuned for the five follow-on pieces to this.  I look forward to your feedback.

 

-Ric