I'm reminded of the online coke machine: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_long.txt https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_long.txt I'm also (many times a day

I'm reminded of the online coke machine: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_long.txt https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_long.txt I'm also (many times a day) reminded of some Douglas Adams bits. 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.” And this (though you should read the full thing): Another problem with the net is that it’s still ‘technology’, and ‘technology’, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’ We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‘crash’ when we tried to use them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs... So, since Douglas was writing (a) a lot more of us are operating in the 15-35 category where technology is cool and (b) a lot more of the stuff around us is technology in the sense that it doesn't quite work yet. It's become pretty much standard in startup-technology land to make the case that some technology "tick all the boxes," saving time, money and generally being ultilitarian and awesome. people who want to buy tecnology because its cool, play along. They need some way of justifying an internet-of-things coke machine, which they want because it's new and exciting. Internet-of-things is still at the stage where we're throwing things against the wall. Most of it is not useful, or barely useful and the people who buy it, do so because they want to... for fun. That doesn't mean none of it is useful or that some generally useless thing isn't useful for you, it just means you have a two legged chair.