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IoT Is the Third Big Technology 'Wave' In the Last 50 Years, Says Harvard
dcblogs writes: The Internet of Things (IoT) may be more significant in reshaping the competitive landscape than the arrival of the Internet. Its productivity potential is so powerful it will deliver a new era of prosperity. That's the argument put forth by Michael Porter, an economist at the Harvard Business School and James Heppelmann, president and CEO of PTC, in a recent Harvard Business Review essay. PTC is a product design software firm that recently acquired machine-to-machine firm Axeda Corp. In the past 50 years, IT has delivered two major transformations or "waves," as the authors describe it. The first came in the 1960s and 1970s, with IT-enabled process automation, computer-aided design and manufacturing resource planning. The second was the Internet and everything it delivered. The third is IoT. That's a strikingly sweeping claim and there will no doubt be contrarians to Porter and Heppelmann's view. But what analysts are clear about is that IoT development today is at an early stage, perhaps at a point similar to 1995, the same year Amazon and eBay went online, followed by Netflix in 1997 and Google in 1998. People understood the trend at the time, but the big picture was still out of focus.
Shill says shilled product is the "next big thing," let's listen!
Yeah, bluetooth is cool. Everything's connected. I can control my toaster with my Harmony remote. But this is NOT bigger than the internet.
Did you know, too?
I for one welcome our new food cooling overlords.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Now that Carmack and all the other legends have left, ZeniMax should repurpose Id Software as an IoT company.
I did not read the article, I quit reading the IoT articles some time ago. Seems they all revolve around the wonderful new advertising and data collection methods that arise as people adopt the IoT.
The day my toaster tells me about the great new pop tarts I could be eating, is the day I take a large axe to it and give it a reprogramming it will never forget.
And how does it differ from the Internet currently?
I am already sick of hearing about it
I'm going the other direction, being less connected.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Wow, an article hyping a fork of the internet that is all...hype!
Let's say 2-10% of the total population use devices to actually control or monitor web-connected appliances. That's not where the market is.
It's all about the 100% of the population are subjected to an unending bombardment of ads on their refrigerator and microwave screens, based on personal data profiles garnered from same-said appliances associated with other known user info. Universal real-time context-based marketing. SCORE!
This isn't about technology. It's about marketing, pure and simple.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Maybe I am too much of skeptic, but color me surprised if IoT products take off. What people really want is convenience and IoT devices currently provide less. When you walk into a room to turn on the lights you don't want to get your phone out of your pocket. What use would an IoT fridge or oven provide? I sure don't want to have to program my fridge every time I put in something or take something out, and if I am using my oven I am standing nearby. Do you really need text alerts when your popcorn is done?
Don't get me wrong there are definite use cases, even if some have small audiences. But I think the suggestion that this is as big of a game changer as the internet is silly. Way back in the 90's when the internet was getting started even then people recognized the usefulness. Being able to have messages sent instantly and be able to give information on topics. No one is nearly as excited to have their remote tell them their lawn mower needs it's oil changed and that they burnt their poptart. Let alone be left in the dark for the night because their light bulb got a virus.
Was my gut reaction and on more studied reflection - BULLSHIT!
As long as mass power outages are a thing, the IoT is pretty irrelevant at this junction. You can talk about wholesale connectivity and power savings of your house power profile with the IoT, when 99.9% of the US does not experience a power outage in terms of years or even a decade. If you tooked at the state of power and connectivity in US with a microscope, you'd laugh at just how fragile we, the US, really are. For all the money involved in these markets, across the US, it's quite a joke actually.
"Its productivity potential is so powerful it will deliver a new era of prosperity" -Powered by hype! -TM
Let me go through each of the predicted applications of the Internet of Things and see how much, or how little, effect it will have.
Environmental monitoring - Will protect you from a tsunami once a decade. Otherwise, makes no difference to your life.
Infrastructure management - Will make your train run a couple percent faster. Barely noticeable.
Industrial applications - Will let Walmart cut a few more cents off their prices and still make a profit. Barely noticeable.
Energy management - Will cut a few dollars off your electric bill. Barely noticeable.
Medical and healthcare systems - Will get you faster to the hospital when certain medical crises occur. May lead to better treatment of some chronic diseases, once a few decades of research is done based on the resulting data.
Building and home automation - Will change the world just as much as X10 did. Remember them?
Transport Systems - See infrastructure and industry above.
Large scale deployments - May save a little money. Unclear what this category even means.
Compare that to the effects of the internet on business on society. Here are a few of the first ones I can think of:
- Internet purchases
- Telecommuting and eased outsourcing
- Almost replaces the newspaper, travel agent, and snail mail industries
- Social media as a major activity for most people - formation of new geographically-dispersed communities
There's just no reasonable comparison. Even the hype for the IoT is smaller than many of the demonstrable effects for the real internet.
How does the IoT handle security problems? That seems the biggest stumbling block.
"Dumb" things have an important advantage in that they can't be hacked and remotely controlled - especially without your knowing.
The current maintenance nightmare of securing networked devices is already overwhelming (me) and the effects of being hacked are already incredibly expensive. I'm not sure the value gained from IoT is worth it.
Perhaps if the devices were not update-able and only sent and recieved particular commands... but then you lose some of the value that IoT promises?
Complexity Happens
FTFA:
Every product becomes part of a service, and no product will have significance as an independent entity, said Fiona McNeill, global product marketing manager at SAS, an analytics software firm.
Advertising? That's so 90s!
No, notice the SAS there.
What will happen is that your toaster, TV, refrigerator will not work unless they all use the same protocol and you have all three - turned on all the time.
You will have to sign up for a subscription with a monthly fee and a two year contract - with the same terms you'd have with a cell phone or cable TV provider.
And of course, it will create an even larger strain on our budgets for all the extra power it will require.
But the app for your smartphone will be free.
It's one thing if it's in a manufacturing area where machines can "talk" to one another to streamline production - and automated production lines already do this and have been for years - so, this IoT is nothing new.
But, if ... when this makes it into the home (there are going to be many people who think it's cool to have their microwave tell their TV that their popcorn is done and flash the message in the corner because their surround sound drowns out the microwave beep.), it's going to further reduce our standard of living. Because while you're spending your money on that crap, your medical, school, fuel and food costs will continue their longterm upward trend.
tl;dr: This will be used to drain more money out of people's pockets because of their incessant desire for new gadgets that offer very little to the quality of their lives.
That needs to be connected that already isn't.
... so powerful it will deliver a new era of prosperity. That's the argument put forth by Michael Porter, ...
This is not 'an argument', it's a postulate. How does he actually imagine that this fabled 'IoT' (note the fancy capitalisation, an infallible sign that This Is True, for certain values of true). Let's go all the way back to the fundamentals of economy: value is produced by adding labour to natural resources, right? You dig iron ore out of the ground, heat it up and slap it with a hammer - now you have a tool, which is valuable (slightly simplified, I know). Where does the value come from in this IoT? Advertising? Outsourcing? Or does he just mean that the already wealthy will be better able to concentrate what limited wealth there is in their bankaccounts? Value, whichever way you define it, does not come out of thin air and communication.
Let's hear some real arguments, please.
Or virtual reality? Maybe cold fusion? Real AI?
Or maybe take any random cover topic from Wired in the last 15 years...
It already has an IoT trap.
man 7 signal:
SIGIOT 6 Core IOT trap. A synonym for SIGABRT
A good portion of my current income comes from helping organisations simplify their data requirements to their needs, improving the performance of their systems as we go.
The market for this sort of work is growing. Excellent!
As far as I can tell, "Internet of Things" is at present a purely marketing term, and something bandied about by people who are telling us how awesome the future will be and what we'll be using.
Is it a real thing? Is this what people actually want? Or is this just hype and bullshit?
Me, I'm more thinking this falls into the category of most forms of prognostication, isn't as inevitable or desired as people think, and a whole bunch of people are making money by talking about "Interwebs of Stuff".
It's hard not to see this as so much marketing crap, and something for the analysts to talk about that, as usual, they have no idea if it's real or not but need to sell their services.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Okay, I admit I replaced intentionally the I by a l to make this joke working. Neverthless, it seems obvious the IoT evades many of us. It is not about toasters, coffemakers and fridges on the Internet. It can be, but it is probably not where this will be useful to anyone. In fact, the article mentioned bad usage of IoT and warn readers against overengineering it into products. The mass market isn't probably the first market for IoT. Think about monitoring infrastructures and make them smarts after analyzing the data in real time. Can you make a better usage of the infrastructures to avoid the cost of building more infrastructures or costly infrastructures that will not have the expected impact? Provided the Western countries will have to spend litterally trillions of dollars on infrastructures in the next decades, it worth thinking about it and how they can be made smarter. The toy example of the toaster is not an appropriate one understand to potential impact of the IoT.
Achille Talon
Hop!
The only thing driving innovation now is the Internet of Pr0n.
Way more than the internet, dot.com, the cloud and all that jazz combined. With idiots buying some new appliances 'cause they are now "all connected" and manufacturers not giving half a shit about making them secure in any way, with a government thrown in that wants to regulate everything and anything you do, say and think and just waiting for an excuse to regulate the living shit out of anything internet related, this WILL have way more impact on our lives than anything that came before.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Imagine, a vast collection of Things connected electronically! Maybe next we can have an Internet of Itts!
This is all fine and dandy as long as a few simple requirements are well understood by the technology implementers.
1) Legal liability for appliances and their cock ups is handled in much the same way as it is now.
If my toaster starts a fire and burns down my house, the insurance cuts me a check immediately while they handle the legal battle with GE (toaster manufacturer) and UL (Underwriters Laboratory who signed off on the device safety). The same legal protections for technology in appliances should be in effect. If my dishwasher gets malware (or just includes it by default) and causes my refrigerator to stop working and spoil my food, the insurance cuts me a check for my losses and to replace the defective appliances, and handles the legal issues.
2) Device interoperability needs to be as easy as antiquated analog systems.
You could hook up a TV with RCA or coax connections and be watching off a VCR or DVD player in minutes. It's ridiculous that HDMI is rarely so straightforward (it occasionally works this simply). Resolution, aspect ratio, audio stream selection, and DRM phone home setup is retarded.
3) Pick a device class to be the central hub, management, and gatekeeper. I suggest home wifi routers or a cheap, simple network bridge device.
4) Full control of permissions and actions by devices with simple to understand language.
If I don't want my washing machine downloading ads for Tide and Purex, it better f---ing not download ads. Same goes for usage tracking uploads.
5) Power usage should not significantly go up. If anything, connected devices should be able to lend clues as to how little changes can make my home greener and/or lower utility bills. Example: washing machine suggests running wash cycle at 8 PM to get out of peak usage billing. It sends me an SMS if I select, to let me know to put the clothes into the dryer.
6) Device electronics / control should be isolated to prevent the additional complication from increasing failure rate.
It's stupid, bad engineering that the more features a home appliance has, i.e. the more premium it is, the more consumers see failures. If the toaster can't get online, it better still make my toast when I press the button.
First of all the blurb should say "constraints" not "constrains". Second, its closer to 1985 with the rapid development and adoption of personal computers. That's what's similar to now. And Third, its too early to tell. You can't be at the beginning of something and say "this is the beginning of the wave". Because you don't know. If you look at the ocean, for every really huge gigantic wave, there are 1000 really big waves, 1000000 big waves, 1000000000 largish sized waves, and 1000000000000 medium/smallish sized waves. And at the beginning, they all look the same.
Salesman says "This thing I'm selling is the next big thing!!"
Slashdot editors fall for it.
l
I thought "IoT" was was a contraction of "Id10T"
I have to admit, it would be nice if my fridge would automatically re-order things I'm running out of and want always stocked.
I would not be nice if my fridge ordered 50,000 pizzas because the script kiddie down the block H@XX0R3D some NSA-mandated vulnerability.
/IoT
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
This is just marketing nonsense. Everyone with a brain knew netbooks were NOT the biggest new thing and a shift in computers. Nobody wanted a laptop that had a higher failure rate, was slower, was harder to type on, and had a miniature screen that nobody could read. They died after about 2 years of being popular. Now every pawn shop is flooded with them.
Smartwatches died after about 5 minutes of pretending to be popular for the same reason. They're neat and cheap and futuristic but OOPS nobody wants them.
As soon as someone's smartfridge is hacked to send spam, their pacemaker is susceptible to getting hacked, and the a bad firmware flash bricks their toaster and someone drives off with their Lexus after 60 seconds of standing near it with a laptop, the alleged Internet of Things will turn back into the internet of actual computers. Oh wait, that last one is happening right now. And Sync is about to be illegal in cars in most states. Come to think of it, Slashdot covered a smartfridge that was hacked to be a spam server. Oh that's right, Dick Cheney had his pacemaker swapped out for a new one because it was susceptible to remote hacking. I'm sure a smart toaster got bricked somewhere too so kiss the IoT goodbye.
Its productivity potential is so powerful it will deliver a new era of prosperity.
Seriously, how did we, as a species, ever get by without an Internet-connected refrigerator that can track milk usage? Or a WiFi thermostat? Like a fool, I've simply set mine to a low of 70 and high of 78, letting my 16 SEER heat-pump auto-switch as needed. Curse my short-sightedness; I have been blinded by my comfortable room temperatures!!
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
He must have a book to sell or a consulting gig with Obama.
The things that need sensors to operate properly and or safely already have them.
Things that don't at best stand to benefit only marginally and at questionable ROI to their users.
The only point of salivating over IoT is selling gimmicks and excuses to spy on everyone and everything for profit. To quote TFA "and after-sale service and by creating the need for new activities such as product data analytics and security."
How does the customer benefit from that? They don't... was never the point.
They're pushing it so hard. They've totally run out of ideas. They've dug to the bottom of the barrel, and all they've found is fascist surveillance and built-in obsolescence. We've seen the future, and it's foreign slaves pumping pollutants into their rivers while making products. It's Western slaves working 60 hours a week or putting off other things to afford said products. It's like Orwell said--a boot on your neck, that's the future. Fuck them and their IoT. Got to Hell and eat rotten fish.
I sure hope I can use the IoT to control a monorail!
who wants an internet connected toilet that automatically retweets the color and consistency of your latest excretion and cross references it against WebMD? (ok maybe it would go OK in Japan)
It's simply the latest wave of the "On the Internet!" fad.
Viewing webpages ON THE INTERNET
Watching movies ON THE INTERNET
Banking ON THE INTERNET
Buying dog food ON THE INTERNET
Your car ON THE INTERNET
Your refrigerator ON THE INTERNET
Your thermostat ON THE INTERNET
Your toilet ON THE INTERNET
While the gear geek in me thinks "Cool! We can do that!"
The rest of me really, SERIOUSLY questions other ramifications brought on by "Everything ON THE INTERNET". Like privacy. And security.
Think of "Your security system ON THE INTERNET". Now think of a tech-savvy burglar. They basically use your own house to recon you. Figure out when you're out, then hit you by opening the doors for themselves.
Or, if you REALLY wanna shit your pants, do the "Your pacemaker ON THE INTERNET" thought experiment.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
It's hilarious how the next big thing in technology brings out the Luddites. If you think there are a lot of applications for the Internet, imagine increasing the number of connected devices by orders of magnitude. These will be connected securely and will enhance our quality of life. It's already happening. You guys are just too enamored with the latest gizmo or app to know it. When your car sends diagnostic data to the automaker (which it does -- now) and the car company uses this aggregated data to improve their product, you benefit. But whatever. Go back to thinking SnapChat is clever. The real brains will move the world forward for you.
the Panopticon of Things.
In order for people in a nation to support a market place two things are required. The people must have disposable income and leisure time available. Sadly we are living in a time in the US where most people have less and less disposable income and either have way too much liesure time or way too little liesure time. We can assume the unemployed won't be getting "things" very much at all. And those that work anywhere near minimum wage won't be buying much either. And it is not a tax problem as politicians would have you believe. It is the cost of basic survival is too high and the wealth the rich have been allowed to accumulate has ruined the economy. Yes we do need a fair minimum wage and we also need a maximum wage and earnings limit as well. Failure to do this will result in some sort of revolution which may already be under way. Every crime has an element of rebellion against government in it and every arrest costs the tax payer more money. The downward path is chiseled in rock for all to see.
Yep. Porter's been blathering on for decades. Once a term makes it to the Harvard "Business School" you can be pretty sure there's no content in it.
When all out electronic devices are online, will North Korea be able to turn off all our refrigerators and spoil a whole nations worth of food as easily as it stole Sony Pictures digital assets?
Once everything can get a public IP, you can do cool things like ping your grandfather's pace maker....
ping grandpa .... ...
No response.
"GRANDPA!!!!!"
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Bought a new coffeemaker last year, it has an oh-so-helpful alarm to let you know when the coffee's finished. Which can't be switched off. So when I get up early on Saturday to a nice quiet house, my frickin coffee-maker has to emit 5 piercing beeps to let all the sleepers know I'm making coffee. Really nice when someone is crashed in the living room.
We need a coffee luddite movement.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Please stop the Big Data wet dream of sensors all over collecting information they have no business having. The security nightmare of millions of half-ass secured devices leaking data 24 hrs a day is not a good thing for society. There could be plenty of value in certain devices communicating, but on an intranet only and with very limited extranet access only if and when appropriate. The current model where things just get stuck on the internet with no limitations is the wrong approach for the consumer and the health of the internet.
I was going to say that his earlier stuff was OK, but then he went a bit bonkers. However I was getting confused Tom Peters.
Nonetheless, I think his value chain diagram is a digram for a diagram's sake.
As for competitive advantage, I think the notion of it has been around for a long time.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I can't wait: We will all be surrounded by a sea of devices, all beta quality - as is the norm today - such that every single day will involve struggle with 5% of the devices not doing what they are supposed to do; and all will require constant software updates; and all will have security vulnerabilities. Nice. Please count me out!