Glimpse? It's already here: see what happened to Nest. The last episode of the Bad Voltage podcast basically features a long discussion on what IoT devices should be able to do when they lose the "I" for one reason or another.
Tbh, I think we'll eventually need laws: something saying "companies should guarantee serviceability and functioning of advanced devices for 10 years, rain or shine (bar nuclear holocaust)". For all the loathing this idea gets, it's the only way to tell the market to "not be stupid". Once businesses start planning for extended serviceability, they'll work on things like durable interfaces that can be easily implemented on newer patforms, offline modes etc etc, which will be innovative and will greatly benefit consumers. As these sort of systems become routine, the 10-year window will naturally extend itself.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
"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".
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.
> door/window sensors you can remotely monitor (a lot cheaper than a subscription to ADT or whatever)
ADT's value is that they continuously monitor the system status, contact you when it changes, and dispatch the police for true alarms. Unmonitored alarms have been a thing for decades.
> Of course you will because there's maybe one other thermostat at the home store that isn't garbage?
What is your definition of "garbage"? I have had no issues buying thermostats, either before or since the Nest.
> And they still cost about as much.
Huh? The Nest is $250. I never have, and probably never will, pay more than $100 for a thermostat, and usually pay less than $50.
I don't much care if police or fire is dispatched while we're out of the house. That's what insurance is for. I much prefer having the ability to monitor myself without an exorbitant monthly fee (I'm guessing it varies, but in my area it's typically about $100/month). It's mostly just to ensure I didn't drive off and leave the garage door open again anyways.
I bought several high-end 5 or 7 day programmable thermostats. Looking at Home Depot right now most of those are still pushing $200. And they're "Indiglo" pieces of junk that will be almost entirely illegible in a year's time IME.
The Honeywell Lyric for example can't turn on/off the fan on the device. You also can't schedule on the device. Need the app for that. And the app appears broken for a lot of users.
Nest just got a lot of things right. My only real complaint is the scheduling UX is kinda goofy. But it does work, and it's much quicker than any other I've tried. Otherwise it does everything I want and it's saved me money. That's a convenience and utility worth paying a bit more for to me.
This stuff mostly comes down to saving money to me. In the same way I buy my iPhone outright and spend $45/month for a 5Gb/unlimited-minutes phone plan, I like the idea of spending a bit more up-front to be more liquid later.
But back to thermostats. After reading the reviews this morning, unless you want to buy into a Kickstarter or something (with it's own risks), the market still seems to be mostly "garbage" IMO. Maybe the Ecobee is a decent Nest alternative? I dunno. I've had my Nest for about 5 years now. It's paid for itself. Hopefully I don't have to find out what else is out there anytime soon.
> I don't much care if police or fire is dispatched while we're out of the house. That's what insurance is for. I much prefer having the ability to monitor myself without an exorbitant monthly fee (I'm guessing it varies, but in my area it's typically about $100/month). It's mostly just to ensure I didn't drive off and leave the garage door open again anyways.
I care, because it's the reason I have a security system in the first place. I don't care much for a system that simply tells me if I left a door open. Also, there are things insurance can't replace. I'd rather pay for the risk reduction of having a monitored system then have to go through losing a bunch of personally important but otherwise middling value stuff again.
BTW, I only pay $58/month for full monitoring (burglar and fire), and could cut it to about $40/month if I shopped around.
> I bought several high-end 5 or 7 day programmable thermostats. Looking at Home Depot right now most of those are still pushing $200. And they're "Indiglo" pieces of junk that will be almost entirely illegible in a year's time IME.
I don't buy high-end thermostats. I put a $50 Honeywell (http://www.homedepot.com/p/Honeywell-5-2-Day-Programmable-Th...) in my mom's house and it has worked flawlessly for six years. I have the same basic thermostat in my own house, though that one is almost 20 years old. If it failed, I would get another one of those $50 Honeywells (or build my own). I'm not going to buy anything in Home Depots "WiFi" or "Touch Screen" categories until those come way down in price.
> The Honeywell Lyric for example can't turn on/off the fan on the device. You also can't schedule on the device. Need the app for that. And the app appears broken for a lot of users.
The Lyric is a piece of shit and I would never buy it.
> But back to thermostats. After reading the reviews this morning, unless you want to buy into a Kickstarter or something (with it's own risks), the market still seems to be mostly "garbage" IMO. Maybe the Ecobee is a decent Nest alternative? I dunno. I've had my Nest for about 5 years now. It's paid for itself. Hopefully I don't have to find out what else is out there anytime soon.
I think I understand your "garbage" comment now. You are only looking at the advanced, connected thermostats. In that case, I agree that everything in that segment except Nest is crap. Thing is, I don't care about that segment at all. Other than remote control I don't see anything any of those thermostats give me over standard 5-2 programmables that justifies the extra $200.
And that's cool for you. My MIL is the same way. Wouldn't live without a security system. I'm not one of those people so I don't want to pay those prices.
> BTW, I only pay $58/month for full monitoring (burglar and fire), and could cut it to about $40/month if I shopped around.
I live in a house in a relatively high-crime area of Dallas. It's not that cheap for me according to what neighbors say. But anything at all really is too much for me I suppose so eh.
> I don't buy high-end thermostats.
Ok... well, then in my poorly insulated 1970's home in Dallas I'd probably be spending an extra $50+ every month during the summer cooling the house when I don't need to. Thinking about it I suppose the value is highly variable on your home and location.
Yes, who doesn't love the old dial thermostats? That's some of the charm of the Nest's design I suppose. But efficiency isn't their strong suit. And I like being able to adjust the thermostat in the dark on my way to bed without turning on the lights.
I don't find much value in doing anything online however. I'd be perfectly happy with a Nest that only did the scheduling and motion sensing without any of the "OMG you can turn on the heat on your way home from work!" stuff. I don't mind being less than optimally comfortable for an hour or so while my A/C warms/cools the house once we get home. If Nest started charging for it I certainly wouldn't pay for it.
> Unmonitored alarms have been a thing for decades.
Not in quite the same way, as people haven't been carrying around constantly connected mobile devices they could be alerted on. (You can't remote view a camera on a pager)
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.
Similarly, my house has two Honeywell networked thermostats. These are networked devices controllable via smartphone or web app, etc. But if the company stopped providing the service behind it, they're still perfectly adequate programmable thermostats. They'll keep on working fine, albeit requiring manual programming, rather than turn into paperweights.
I fail to see the excitement about the Nest, and I claim that yours hasn't saved you any money compared to mine, even adjusted for effort involved. The time it took me to set up my device - when I actually know what our work/home schedule is, so no training is involved, is minimal. And there's no confusion in the device when, at this time of year, I want to just use outside air through open windows to keep my home cool. A device that can leverage the human mind's power is great. A device that simply replaces one flavor of (trivial) mental effort with a different one isn't terribly valuable.
I agree with your assessment of the Nest. The number of times I've wanted to turn the heat on or off when I'm not at home is exactly zero.
I've got a manually-programmable Honeywell and it's been working fine for over five years. Apart from the very occasional adjustments (daylight saving time, resetting the furnace filter reminder, and replacing batteries) it needs very little care and feeding.
Yes, many of us would like for the "I" in "IoT" to stand for "intranet". Cloud-dependence and routing all that data through the Internet is both insecure, wasteful and completely idiotic from engineering standpoint. It's done because companies are testing a new way of extracting money from non-tech-savvy but tech-liking population.
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.
There are many useful things I might want to do privately on an isolated network, that are not really compelling if I have to send everything to a third party with a 10 page privacy policy agreement.
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.
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.
Yeah, I'm not that enthusiastic about it. But it brings up interesting things like a system showing recipe ideas you can make without going to the store or whatever. Which maybe that is stupid too, but there are lots of possibilities. So in some sense, the 'works great' up there has to include a compelling use case.
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.
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.
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?
Yeah, but that's a problem even without an internet connected opener.
For example, my left most garage door opener happened to get onto the same frequency/code cycle as the neighbor across the cul de sac's door opener about a year ago and their opener opens/closes my door EVERY TIME. Mine is an old Craftsman piece of crap but it's the door I never use so I just leave it unplugged rather than trying to actually fix the problem.
If instead of RF with half assed code hopping we could use more secure tokens through a gateway device that introduced very little lag, we'd have way more secure garage doors than what we have now.
Unfortunately those Internet module additions to garage doors are just adding weak Internet security to weak garage door security.
The European Union already has these laws, the goods must be fit for purpose for a "reasonable" duration. In the UK the maximum is 6 years, but it depends on the item and how much it is used.
However, up to now most things break because they wear out, or from a manufacturing fault. That's quite different from the manufacturer switching off some supporting servers, since most people would expect most old devices to work for longer than the minimum.
I recall the Norwegian consumer agency and Nokia was in a row back around 2000 about the length of mandatory warranty on mobile phones. Nokia wanted it to be 2 years, same as most electronics, but the agency wanted a couple more added or some such.
That doesn't improve the accessibility of the devices, which is part of the problem. Access is a feature that depends on the ability of the consumer and is therefore often not considered, but is also not promoted by producers. To simply legislate that products shouldn't fail doesn't improve the authority of the consumer much, now does it? That's blanked card legislation and is in theory not viable. 10 Years seems like a rather arbitrary rule, anyhow.
You are probably not actually a lawyer, neither am I. I could still agree with the desire for intervention when the majorities on both sides of the problem are unreliable.
>For all the loathing this idea gets, it's the only way to tell the market to "not be stupid"
Ah, the old "stay out of the business of the things I like, and regulate the things I don't" argument.
>greatly benefit consumers
This is why the "market" will innovate. If these companies don't provide benefit to you, or you don't like their practices, don't buy the product. There's no need for government to step in to write a bunch of arbitrary rules.
The free market is going to work everything out. That's why we don't need to regulate child labor/family medical leave/net neutrality... I could go on. History proves this argument a fallacy.
Are you actually trying to tell me that in places where, say, child labor is a problem they have free markets? That free markets caused child labor issues?
Show me anywhere there's remotely close to a free market, as opposed to massive government meddling and coercion, and we'll determine how well off the people are.
>History proves this argument a fallacy.
You have a bizarre view of history. I look back and see your vaunted governmental powers causing tremendous human suffering.
Yes, because standard business practice of fucking your customers over to the extent allowed by law is of course a result of regulations, and if governments didn't interfere then companies would not be fucking people over all the time.
Think about it. You probably owe your life to regulations ensuring your food is edible, and your medicine isn't poison.
>Think about it. You probably owe your life to regulations ensuring your food is edible, and your medicine isn't poison.
This is just laughable. Yeah, nameless, faceless companies who earn profit from consumers eating and drinking their goods are just going to poison everyone. It's not like they are composed of actual people with friends and families too, right? They want to kill everyone.
Again, show me the greatest historical body-counts being business related, not governmental or politically motivated.
For food poisoning, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal : "A [WHO] spokesman said the scale of the problem proved it was "clearly not an isolated accident, [but] a large-scale intentional activity to deceive consumers for simple, basic, short-term profits."
Tbh, I think we'll eventually need laws: something saying "companies should guarantee serviceability and functioning of advanced devices for 10 years, rain or shine (bar nuclear holocaust)". For all the loathing this idea gets, it's the only way to tell the market to "not be stupid". Once businesses start planning for extended serviceability, they'll work on things like durable interfaces that can be easily implemented on newer patforms, offline modes etc etc, which will be innovative and will greatly benefit consumers. As these sort of systems become routine, the 10-year window will naturally extend itself.