Disclaimer: I'm a VP for an IoT consultancy, and work with some large Fortune 500s and their IoT initiatives. A few thoughts: 1. Keep in mind the problems in

Disclaimer: I'm a VP for an IoT consultancy, and work with some large Fortune 500s and their IoT initiatives. A few thoughts: 1. Keep in mind the problems in this article span the ENTIRE IoT spectrum: industrial, transportation, medical... you name it, it is messy. 2. Be careful what you ask for: you can script and hack a lot of cool IoT stuff today. As the road gets paved, lots of that freedom will go away. It will get much easier for the common user, but not as fun for us hackers. 3. IoT in 2020 is like the web was in 1995: lots of potential, but it's mostly a dirt road. I have a pet theory that consumer IoT today is like the web pre-Google: it was cool, but difficult to navigate and use. Once we get our "Google" moment, we'll see a slow transition to a much more innovative and useful world. But we'll need some truly innovative new product categories, not just bolting on IoT features to existing things. Google and Amazon won't drive that: they're not making things, they're just trying to be the UI and infrastructure to the smart home. [1] What could those categories be? Just some thoughts: 1. A truly smart and autonomous kitchen: "Kitchen, make me a sandwich" (This is my favorite line when I speak at conferences) 2. Smart electrical infrastructure of the home: I want to buy a smart light bulb, plug in it, and it "just works" (securely, of course) 3. Smart windows. (these are coming... they rock) 4. Microlocation. Everywhere. On all the things. I want to know where everything is in the home, even if I packed it in a box 5 years ago. "Google, where are my keys" [2] This might be smart tags, or just computer vision. 5. Walls are touch screen displays, likely with some sort of smart ink so we're not pushing a lot of light into the space. Apple's smart glasses might simulate this eventually, so this might not make sense... 6. Synthetic sensors everywhere. [1] Don't get me wrong: The Echo/Alexa product line is really incredible. But until Amazon starts making some cool actuators that do real work for me, it's just a cool VUI. [2] There's a comic from the old days that had this question. The punchline was "On your #@&*@# desk".