I'd say first and foremost it's exciting as a (purely virtual) software developer to actually do things in the real world through devices. Excitement drives hyp

I'd say first and foremost it's exciting as a (purely virtual) software developer to actually do things in the real world through devices. Excitement drives hype, and so on. For the usage side, i think the actual useful stuff is when many of these devices are capable of interacting intelligently. For example take room air management: I want to sleep in cool conditions, wake up warmth, save energy while I'm at work, come home into a acceptable warm temperature, and whenever I'm home I also want to breath fresh air. This needs a interaction between the air conditionier, heater and windows, plus my smartphone to enable them learning my daily routine: wake up times through the week/weekend, when I leave, when I start to return home, when I arrive at home, when I go to sleep, and this cycles optimized through the seasons and outside weather conditions. Also I want to "fine-tune" this orchestrated system easily with my phone, not controlling every single device on its own. And finally: save energy whenever possible. Add in more family members ad their schedules. So basically we need a myriad of ensors/devices, plus some machinelearning that runs on dirt-cheap hardware, plus some kind of local cloud hub, which itself can be securely accessed remotely. I hope you get the idea