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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!
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.
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.
Yeah, I have had a coffee maker for 20 years that will make my coffee 10 minutes before my alarm goes off and I will have hot coffee in the morning.
I rarely use that feature, even though it is awesome and only requires me to dump in coffee grounds and push a button at night. Otherwise I have to do that and wait 10 minutes for my coffee in the morning. Big whoop.
So why would I use 95% of the promised IoT benefits, most of which are not as awesome as having hot, fresh coffee first thing in the morning. How lazy am I supposed to be?
Yes, there are some cool things which I will use in the IoT, but most of what is touted as revolutionary is just stuff that isn't hard to do anyway.
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.
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.
Dumbass. When they talk about increasing productivity, they're not talking about you controlling your toaster with your remote. They're talking about an army of connected sensors on the production floor, delivery trucks, planes, etc and all talking to each other. They're talking about more accurate weather forecasting from distributed barometers in smartphones and other sensors. Thing bigger. Yes, this is going to be big, but not technically bigger than the internet, since it's part of the internet.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.