6 ms·

> For all the loathing this idea gets, it's the only way to tell the market to "not be stupid". No, the market will be just fine. IoT is a fad. Much of it is

by dcposch 10y ago

> For all the loathing this idea gets, it's the only way to tell the market to "not be stupid". No, the market will be just fine. IoT is a fad. Much of it is just taking things that were simple and reliable and making them complex and flaky, in order to market as "smart" or "advanced" or "high tech". Fire alarms that inexplicably run Linux. Thermostats that brick themselves one morning after an auto update. "Smart fridges" with a big touch screen that nobody will actually use. [1] Buyers will get burned. IoT will lose its "wow" factor and all this will be seen, in hindsight, as comically unnecessary and embarassingly tacky. Consumer Reports will give out a bunch of black circles. The market will correct. [1]: https://twitter.com/internetofshit https://twitter.com/internetofshit http://favstar.fm/users/internetofshit http://favstar.fm/users/internetofshit

sneak 10y ago
Telephones worked a lot better before the internet. They still haven't recovered. I assume the same thing will happen here. Most people do not research. Reliability will fall and, while it may recover a bit, will not recover fully.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  To the extent that telephones are worse now than they were before (I'm not actually sure what you're thinking of?), I'd attribute it first to the cratering demand for telephones.
  - extra88 10y ago
    On POTS, call quality was arguably better, calls didn't get dropped, a handset and physical dialpad are ergonomically better, and the system in a region was less likely to go down because of a power outage. There many ways in which POTS is worse but there is no inherent reason why the good things about it had to be lost.
    - thaumasiotes 10y ago
      Has any of that changed? The fact that people aren't using telephones doesn't mean they've gotten worse. What was better before the internet and is worse now?
      - extra88 10y ago
        I was mainly comparing landlines to cell phones and VOIP but even the traditional landlines may be a bit worse as they've gone from a switched to packetized infrastructure.
        ambulancechaser 10y ago
        Well, comparing cell phones to landlines and calling it worse seems to miss the addition of a key feature: mobility. It's kinda like comparing a home kitchen to one in an airplane and finding the airplane version woeful and without any improvement over what the microwave brought us in the 50's, all while neglecting to mention that one version is able to fly...
        doctorshady 10y ago
        At the moment, the traditional phone network largely runs on a circuit switched architecture. Different companies have different plans for it; some seem perfectly content with it the way it is, others can't get out of it fast enough.
    - sneak 10y ago
      Yes, there absolutely is: packet switching is vastly more efficient than circuit switching. Almost all of the good things of the PSTN directly equate to circuit switching; almost everything that sucks about VoIP: packet switching.
- rtpg 10y ago
  I don't know, conference call capacity is now ubiquitous and in Japan 4G phones now work over VoIP allowing for much higher quality calls. And landlines still work...
- bad_user 10y ago
  That's not true. I remember the first GSM networks in my country, from the nineties, along with available phone models, and they weren't that great.
  - rhino369 10y ago
    He probably means landlines or maybe analog cell phones. VoIP and GSM aren't great.
digi_owl 10y ago
Actually i would not mind a fridge with a built in RFID reader that can figure out its contents and dump me a list when i stand there wondering what to buy for the evening.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  That's the sort of thing that will seem stupid right up until the point where it works great with no effort. I feel like a lot of IOT stuff is like that.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Yeah it would require that all products that today have a barcode comes with an FRID tag, so its not something that would happen over night.
    - mlonkibjuyhv 10y ago
      And you would need a way to reliably read a nfc tag in an ocean of other tags.
      - potatolicious 10y ago
        And you'd need the tags to be embarrassingly cheap. If you want your box of cereal to have an RFID tag, the RFID tag has to be a fraction of the price of a piece of cardboard.
  - ams6110 10y ago
    I don't know about everyone else but I don't always want the same things in my fridge other than a few standards like milk, eggs, butter. And I can see at a glance if I need those. Everything else I buy more on the basis of what I feel like eating that night or the next couple of days.
    - maxerickson 10y ago
ssmoot 10y ago
My Nest has saved me money and helped the power grid and the environment. I don't think that one is a good example of complexity for it's own sake. Plus using the Nest is just a lot nicer than the expensive pure garbage that came before it. Security cameras, a remote deadbolt, door/window sensors you can remotely monitor (a lot cheaper than a subscription to ADT or whatever), these are all pretty nice as connected devices. I don't see going back. I don't want to be throwing money down the drain either though. And the market will fail here. Most Nest users that got burned will buy another Nest. Of course you will because there's maybe one other thermostat at the home store that isn't garbage? And they still cost about as much.
- Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
  I've got a handful of DLink WiFi cameras that, in my mind, are almost the perfect way to do IoT. They've got an app and can do all their stuff through the cloud, but I have them running on a separate WiFi network that is unable to access the internet. The cameras don't actually need that access, I just lose the cloud features. This is, for me anyway, a really good way to do it. Consumers that want the stuff that the cloud gives them (easy remote monitoring, etc) can have it. Consumers like me that would rather roll their own recording system and access the cameras by VPN can do that too. This is possible because the cameras serve up a MJPEG stream at a specific URL, in addition to however they communicate with the cloud stuff. If DLink does go out of business (I hope they don't because I'm going to buy more of these cameras), all of my stuff will just keep working. I'd love to see more IoT stuff that works this way.
  - dstroot 10y ago
    So... you prefer "Internet" of things that do not connect to the Internet? (go ahead and downvote - just could not resist)
    - Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
      Ironically, in some cases that's exactly what I want! But what it really boils down to is that the Internet piece should be optional and the device should still function (perhaps in a reduced capacity) if whatever it's accessing on the Internet goes away.
Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
As I posted in another comment, DLink has the right idea with their WiFi cameras. They've got all the IoT goodness - an app that lets you view from anywhere, etc. But they also function perfectly if they're not allowed to access the internet and expose their video stream in a standard way. It's the best of both worlds. I've set up my cameras on a WiFi network that can't talk to the outside world. If DLink goes out of business, everything will keep running as though nothing has changed.
- ethbro 10y ago
  This kind of marketing is what needs to be trademarked (a la WiFi Alliance). Where one of the stimulations of using an IoT mark is clearly differentiating on the packaging what functionality is "unconnected" and what is "connected", and then having graceful degradation. The larger problem is that the code behind most of these embedded devices is the most atrocious copy & paste & hack from StackOverflow just enough to get it working, then shipping.
  - Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
    I agree, this would be ideal. Knowing what the product does when the cloud service inevitably goes away is a good thing. I get the impression that some part of DLink understands that this is a feature that some people want. Even the people who design the packaging have made vague references to not requiring the cloud service. It's not spelled out as clearly as I'd like, but that might come in time. As for the code quality, I honestly have no idea. I've had a couple of them running for months on end serving an MJPEG stream to a computer running 'motion', only powered off when they needed to be moved around. They do what I need them to without needing any babysitting.
manyxcxi 10y ago
I think you're dead wrong on IoT being fad but agree on the popular consumer examples you've provided. There are some gems out there now, but most of the rest are worthless without the internet. These products will wind up getting skipped over eventually and companies will begin making their products more robust in order to maintain presence in the market. As (home) automation protocols settle down, devices will not need the Internet directly themselves, they'll communicate exclusively through a hub (like my house and Z-Wave, at the moment). These devices won't/don't need the internet to perform their basic functions, but you might lose some advanced functions without it, and that should be okay. The only IoT devices I have in my house that actually talk to the Internet are my home automation hub (for the app on my phone) and the Nest Cams I've got. Had I not gotten them for free I would be using something else not directly connected. I didn't perform some wizardry to make this happen, I know the space and learned what was available and how to piece it together. I bought half the stuff from Lowe's/Home Depot and the other half from Amazon. This is all consumer grade stuff, nothing fancy. When the internet goes out my whole house still works, but I lose fancy features like chained events (or scenes) and I can't use my phone to control the house. Everything else works just like the house should. That is where we will get to for everyone.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  I like to think of it in terms of garage door openers. Very few people will retrofit their garage door opener to be connected for $50. Almost everyone will have a connected garage door opener when there aren't any being sold that do not have connectivity.
  - musesum 10y ago
    There have been burglaries in my neighborhood. The thief does a drive by with one code and sees which door will open. Then waits a few days to revisit the garage to steal bikes. I wonder what would be more profitable: Stealing the bike? Or: leaving a note that links to a personalized sales pitch, including a vid of their door being opened?
    - 10y ago
rsync 10y ago
"Buyers will get burned. IoT will lose its "wow" factor and all this will be seen, in hindsight, as comically unnecessary and embarassingly tacky." The tacky part is the most important one. Circa 2000-2003, an LCD screen, or a flat panel TV, were somewhat interesting and exotic (and expensive). Now they are cheap and everywhere and ones ability to distinguish ones self, or ones surrounding is now based on not having a screen. The Tesla 17" monitor that they use to fill up all the space they didn't design is, in my opinion, "peak display panel".

by dcposch 10y ago

sneak 10y ago

Telephones worked a lot better before the internet. They still haven't recovered. I assume the same thing will happen here. Most people do not research. Reliability will fall and, while it may recover a bit, will not recover fully.

thaumasiotes 10y ago
To the extent that telephones are worse now than they were before (I'm not actually sure what you're thinking of?), I'd attribute it first to the cratering demand for telephones.
- extra88 10y ago
  On POTS, call quality was arguably better, calls didn't get dropped, a handset and physical dialpad are ergonomically better, and the system in a region was less likely to go down because of a power outage. There many ways in which POTS is worse but there is no inherent reason why the good things about it had to be lost.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    Has any of that changed? The fact that people aren't using telephones doesn't mean they've gotten worse. What was better before the internet and is worse now?
    - extra88 10y ago
      I was mainly comparing landlines to cell phones and VOIP but even the traditional landlines may be a bit worse as they've gone from a switched to packetized infrastructure.
      - ambulancechaser 10y ago
        Well, comparing cell phones to landlines and calling it worse seems to miss the addition of a key feature: mobility. It's kinda like comparing a home kitchen to one in an airplane and finding the airplane version woeful and without any improvement over what the microwave brought us in the 50's, all while neglecting to mention that one version is able to fly...
      - doctorshady 10y ago
        At the moment, the traditional phone network largely runs on a circuit switched architecture. Different companies have different plans for it; some seem perfectly content with it the way it is, others can't get out of it fast enough.
  - sneak 10y ago
    Yes, there absolutely is: packet switching is vastly more efficient than circuit switching. Almost all of the good things of the PSTN directly equate to circuit switching; almost everything that sucks about VoIP: packet switching.
rtpg 10y ago
I don't know, conference call capacity is now ubiquitous and in Japan 4G phones now work over VoIP allowing for much higher quality calls. And landlines still work...
bad_user 10y ago
That's not true. I remember the first GSM networks in my country, from the nineties, along with available phone models, and they weren't that great.
- rhino369 10y ago
  He probably means landlines or maybe analog cell phones. VoIP and GSM aren't great.

digi_owl 10y ago

Actually i would not mind a fridge with a built in RFID reader that can figure out its contents and dump me a list when i stand there wondering what to buy for the evening.

maxerickson 10y ago
That's the sort of thing that will seem stupid right up until the point where it works great with no effort. I feel like a lot of IOT stuff is like that.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Yeah it would require that all products that today have a barcode comes with an FRID tag, so its not something that would happen over night.
  - mlonkibjuyhv 10y ago
    And you would need a way to reliably read a nfc tag in an ocean of other tags.
    - potatolicious 10y ago
      And you'd need the tags to be embarrassingly cheap. If you want your box of cereal to have an RFID tag, the RFID tag has to be a fraction of the price of a piece of cardboard.
- ams6110 10y ago
  I don't know about everyone else but I don't always want the same things in my fridge other than a few standards like milk, eggs, butter. And I can see at a glance if I need those. Everything else I buy more on the basis of what I feel like eating that night or the next couple of days.
  - maxerickson 10y ago

ssmoot 10y ago

My Nest has saved me money and helped the power grid and the environment. I don't think that one is a good example of complexity for it's own sake. Plus using the Nest is just a lot nicer than the expensive pure garbage that came before it. Security cameras, a remote deadbolt, door/window sensors you can remotely monitor (a lot cheaper than a subscription to ADT or whatever), these are all pretty nice as connected devices. I don't see going back. I don't want to be throwing money down the drain either though. And the market will fail here. Most Nest users that got burned will buy another Nest. Of course you will because there's maybe one other thermostat at the home store that isn't garbage? And they still cost about as much.

Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
I've got a handful of DLink WiFi cameras that, in my mind, are almost the perfect way to do IoT. They've got an app and can do all their stuff through the cloud, but I have them running on a separate WiFi network that is unable to access the internet. The cameras don't actually need that access, I just lose the cloud features. This is, for me anyway, a really good way to do it. Consumers that want the stuff that the cloud gives them (easy remote monitoring, etc) can have it. Consumers like me that would rather roll their own recording system and access the cameras by VPN can do that too. This is possible because the cameras serve up a MJPEG stream at a specific URL, in addition to however they communicate with the cloud stuff. If DLink does go out of business (I hope they don't because I'm going to buy more of these cameras), all of my stuff will just keep working. I'd love to see more IoT stuff that works this way.
- dstroot 10y ago
  So... you prefer "Internet" of things that do not connect to the Internet? (go ahead and downvote - just could not resist)
  - Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
    Ironically, in some cases that's exactly what I want! But what it really boils down to is that the Internet piece should be optional and the device should still function (perhaps in a reduced capacity) if whatever it's accessing on the Internet goes away.

Mister_Snuggles 10y ago

As I posted in another comment, DLink has the right idea with their WiFi cameras. They've got all the IoT goodness - an app that lets you view from anywhere, etc. But they also function perfectly if they're not allowed to access the internet and expose their video stream in a standard way. It's the best of both worlds. I've set up my cameras on a WiFi network that can't talk to the outside world. If DLink goes out of business, everything will keep running as though nothing has changed.

ethbro 10y ago
This kind of marketing is what needs to be trademarked (a la WiFi Alliance). Where one of the stimulations of using an IoT mark is clearly differentiating on the packaging what functionality is "unconnected" and what is "connected", and then having graceful degradation. The larger problem is that the code behind most of these embedded devices is the most atrocious copy & paste & hack from StackOverflow just enough to get it working, then shipping.
- Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
  I agree, this would be ideal. Knowing what the product does when the cloud service inevitably goes away is a good thing. I get the impression that some part of DLink understands that this is a feature that some people want. Even the people who design the packaging have made vague references to not requiring the cloud service. It's not spelled out as clearly as I'd like, but that might come in time. As for the code quality, I honestly have no idea. I've had a couple of them running for months on end serving an MJPEG stream to a computer running 'motion', only powered off when they needed to be moved around. They do what I need them to without needing any babysitting.

manyxcxi 10y ago

I think you're dead wrong on IoT being fad but agree on the popular consumer examples you've provided. There are some gems out there now, but most of the rest are worthless without the internet. These products will wind up getting skipped over eventually and companies will begin making their products more robust in order to maintain presence in the market. As (home) automation protocols settle down, devices will not need the Internet directly themselves, they'll communicate exclusively through a hub (like my house and Z-Wave, at the moment). These devices won't/don't need the internet to perform their basic functions, but you might lose some advanced functions without it, and that should be okay. The only IoT devices I have in my house that actually talk to the Internet are my home automation hub (for the app on my phone) and the Nest Cams I've got. Had I not gotten them for free I would be using something else not directly connected. I didn't perform some wizardry to make this happen, I know the space and learned what was available and how to piece it together. I bought half the stuff from Lowe's/Home Depot and the other half from Amazon. This is all consumer grade stuff, nothing fancy. When the internet goes out my whole house still works, but I lose fancy features like chained events (or scenes) and I can't use my phone to control the house. Everything else works just like the house should. That is where we will get to for everyone.

maxerickson 10y ago
I like to think of it in terms of garage door openers. Very few people will retrofit their garage door opener to be connected for $50. Almost everyone will have a connected garage door opener when there aren't any being sold that do not have connectivity.
- musesum 10y ago
  There have been burglaries in my neighborhood. The thief does a drive by with one code and sees which door will open. Then waits a few days to revisit the garage to steal bikes. I wonder what would be more profitable: Stealing the bike? Or: leaving a note that links to a personalized sales pitch, including a vid of their door being opened?
  - 10y ago

rsync 10y ago

"Buyers will get burned. IoT will lose its "wow" factor and all this will be seen, in hindsight, as comically unnecessary and embarassingly tacky." The tacky part is the most important one. Circa 2000-2003, an LCD screen, or a flat panel TV, were somewhat interesting and exotic (and expensive). Now they are cheap and everywhere and ones ability to distinguish ones self, or ones surrounding is now based on not having a screen. The Tesla 17" monitor that they use to fill up all the space they didn't design is, in my opinion, "peak display panel".