A year ago I would have talked about "THE INTERNET of THINGS." Now I'm more content to talk about "the internet of things." Capitalization can be important; just ask e.e. cummings. Seriously thought, whether you call it the IoT (Internet of Things) or Ubiquitous Computing or whatever, the ubiquitous future just isn't coming into focus.
I've been sort of thinking about this for a couple years, but it was Chris Anderson's recent tweet that got me thinking about it:
Before we look into the crystal ball, let's look back and find out more about ubiquitous computing...
A Brief Bit of History
Many of us first heard of ubiquitous computing by way of Mark Weiser. Mark was a brilliant guy who, in the late 80's, was thinking very deep thoughts about the relationship between people and computing machinery. Keep in mind, this is well before the web or the mobile revolution or Google or Facebook. In the late 80's computers were generally thought of as being "those beige boxes on your desk." If you were part of the computing elite, you might have a 19 kilo-baud modem to gab with people on your favorite BBS.
At a time when your average computer visionary was rambling on about how the Internet would change the world, Mark was talking about a radical new way to interact with computing machinery. In his 1991 article for Scientific American called "The Computer for the 21st Century," he leads with the statement "the most profound technologies are those that disappear."
By the mid-90's a few core concepts in "Ubiquitous" or "Calm" computing had emerged:
Despite the fact these ideas were being spawned by some of the same smart people who brought us Ethernet and Graphical User Interfaces, they were largely ignored in the dot-com era. The industry was too busy consolidating heir gains from selling main-street incremental improvements over BBSes.
During the technology marketing intermezzo of the "dot bomb," we started hearing rumblings of a new "Internet of Things." It's easy to think that the Internet of Things is just the previous decade's Ubiquitous Computing with a slightly different marketing pitch; and if you only look at the technology, it probably is. But if you look at the business objectives, they're nearly polar opposites. (More on this later...)
The mid-2000's was a relatively difficult time for technology vendors. The Dot Com bubble soaked up a tremendous amount of venture capital; after the bubble burst, that money was lost and investors started asking serious questions from tech firms like "how are you going to get money out of this? and if you say ad sales, i'm going to slap you."
Ubiquitous Computing, with it's promises of changing the way people thought about computing, was a high-risk business proposition. If you did everything right, you could become "the Microsoft of Ubiquitous Computing." But it was very difficult to forecast what the market would look like in the ubiquitous future. Our experience was with selling devices you could hold and with software you could see running. "Ubiquitous" promised us a world where we wouldn't notice the computer. Talking about a product that is virtually indistinguishable from the background makes marketing people very, very nervous.
It's no surprise people started talking about "the Internet of Things." You could actually put your brainstem around it. The IoT is about putting a IPv6 address on every small device so it can stream information to your desktop (or maybe a server app somewhere in the cloud.) Medical and Logistic industries were to be revolutionized by IoT technology, goes the common narrative. After that, the technology will become cheap enough we'll start putting sensors in lightbulbs, carpets, planters, car tires, and every other thing we can see. We'll be awash in environmental data; all we need do is peek into the ether and pluck out the bits we're interested in.
IoT technology has worked somewhat well in the logistics arena; bar codes on inexpensive packages, RFIDs in consumer products and Wi-Fi enabled smart-buckets on factory floors have improved supply chain automation (and presumably enhanced manufacturing efficiency along with it.) Medical sensors have gotten smaller, cheaper and a more disposable in the last couple of decades. But we're a long way from the star-trek future where the ship's computer will constantly monitor your health and tell you need to take emergency meds or call a doctor.
The Unenviable Now
So we're now in a place where Chris Anderson (of all people) puzzles about the usefulness of Twine and Electric Imp. What's up with that?
Context. That's what's up with that. And narrative. And a seamless experience subsuming into our unconscious. Twine & Electric Imp are technology solutions for people who have already figured out some of their environmental computing problems. Unless you know you need temperature, pressure and humidity sensors or need to connect your digital bathroom scale to your iPhone, they come with no use context. There is no default story you can tell the consumer that puts them in the narrative.
I hate to say it, but some of these products are problems in search of a solution.
But it may be okay that you, or me, or Chris Anderson can't find a use for Twine or Electric Imp. As long as there is someone out there who can. Eric von Hippel's texts on innovation talk about "lead users" who identify solutions for specific problems early in a technology life-cycle. If you can't find the mass-market demand for a product, it might just be that you're not in a situation where a particular technology solves your problem.
So it may not be that there is no demand for IoT tchotchkes, it may just be there's no well defined mass-market demand.
Lower Case "internet of things"
There's a joke in the Artificial Intelligence community that "Artificial Intelligence is 10 years off... and has been for the last 50 years!"
Very few people now believe we'll see early ideas of Artificial Intelligence come to fruition in our lifetimes. That is to say, we probably won't have to worry about AI's like HAL-9000 going on astronaut killing sprees anytime soon 'cause we're unlikely to see an AI that can generally simulate all aspects of human cognition.
But even though we don't have intelligent robots doing all the work we want to avoid, the study of artificial intelligence has led to some wonderful technologies like natural language processing, neural networking for image stabilization and even self-driving cars.
These spin-off technologies are often called "lower case artificial intelligence" to distinguish them from the holy grail, upper-case Artificial Intelligence people simulators like HAL-9000 or William Gibson's Wintermute.
So even if we haven't seen the benefits of "The Internet of Things," maybe products like Nest, Hone and various heart rate monitors are the lower-case "internet of things."
I've been sort of thinking about this for a couple years, but it was Chris Anderson's recent tweet that got me thinking about it:
I've got ~every "Internet of Things" device, from Twine to Electric Imp, & have seen all the demos. But still can't find compelling uses...@chr1sa is a well-known tech journalist and gadget aficionado. As Editor-in-Chief at Wired, he's been in a position to see just about every new gadget that comes down the pike. So when he starts tweeting things like this, you have to start wondering about the IoT market. Is it vapourware? Are we just still way early? Are IoT projects suffering from poor marketing? Maybe IoT is successful, we just haven't noticed.
— Chris Anderson (@chr1sa) April 20, 2013
Before we look into the crystal ball, let's look back and find out more about ubiquitous computing...
A Brief Bit of History
Many of us first heard of ubiquitous computing by way of Mark Weiser. Mark was a brilliant guy who, in the late 80's, was thinking very deep thoughts about the relationship between people and computing machinery. Keep in mind, this is well before the web or the mobile revolution or Google or Facebook. In the late 80's computers were generally thought of as being "those beige boxes on your desk." If you were part of the computing elite, you might have a 19 kilo-baud modem to gab with people on your favorite BBS.
At a time when your average computer visionary was rambling on about how the Internet would change the world, Mark was talking about a radical new way to interact with computing machinery. In his 1991 article for Scientific American called "The Computer for the 21st Century," he leads with the statement "the most profound technologies are those that disappear."
By the mid-90's a few core concepts in "Ubiquitous" or "Calm" computing had emerged:
- The purpose of a computer is to help you do something else
- The best computer is a quiet, invisible servant.
- The more you can do by intuition the smarter you are; the computer should extend your unconscious.
- Technology should create calm
Despite the fact these ideas were being spawned by some of the same smart people who brought us Ethernet and Graphical User Interfaces, they were largely ignored in the dot-com era. The industry was too busy consolidating heir gains from selling main-street incremental improvements over BBSes.
During the technology marketing intermezzo of the "dot bomb," we started hearing rumblings of a new "Internet of Things." It's easy to think that the Internet of Things is just the previous decade's Ubiquitous Computing with a slightly different marketing pitch; and if you only look at the technology, it probably is. But if you look at the business objectives, they're nearly polar opposites. (More on this later...)
The mid-2000's was a relatively difficult time for technology vendors. The Dot Com bubble soaked up a tremendous amount of venture capital; after the bubble burst, that money was lost and investors started asking serious questions from tech firms like "how are you going to get money out of this? and if you say ad sales, i'm going to slap you."
Ubiquitous Computing, with it's promises of changing the way people thought about computing, was a high-risk business proposition. If you did everything right, you could become "the Microsoft of Ubiquitous Computing." But it was very difficult to forecast what the market would look like in the ubiquitous future. Our experience was with selling devices you could hold and with software you could see running. "Ubiquitous" promised us a world where we wouldn't notice the computer. Talking about a product that is virtually indistinguishable from the background makes marketing people very, very nervous.
It's no surprise people started talking about "the Internet of Things." You could actually put your brainstem around it. The IoT is about putting a IPv6 address on every small device so it can stream information to your desktop (or maybe a server app somewhere in the cloud.) Medical and Logistic industries were to be revolutionized by IoT technology, goes the common narrative. After that, the technology will become cheap enough we'll start putting sensors in lightbulbs, carpets, planters, car tires, and every other thing we can see. We'll be awash in environmental data; all we need do is peek into the ether and pluck out the bits we're interested in.
IoT technology has worked somewhat well in the logistics arena; bar codes on inexpensive packages, RFIDs in consumer products and Wi-Fi enabled smart-buckets on factory floors have improved supply chain automation (and presumably enhanced manufacturing efficiency along with it.) Medical sensors have gotten smaller, cheaper and a more disposable in the last couple of decades. But we're a long way from the star-trek future where the ship's computer will constantly monitor your health and tell you need to take emergency meds or call a doctor.
The Unenviable Now
So we're now in a place where Chris Anderson (of all people) puzzles about the usefulness of Twine and Electric Imp. What's up with that?
Context. That's what's up with that. And narrative. And a seamless experience subsuming into our unconscious. Twine & Electric Imp are technology solutions for people who have already figured out some of their environmental computing problems. Unless you know you need temperature, pressure and humidity sensors or need to connect your digital bathroom scale to your iPhone, they come with no use context. There is no default story you can tell the consumer that puts them in the narrative.
I hate to say it, but some of these products are problems in search of a solution.
But it may be okay that you, or me, or Chris Anderson can't find a use for Twine or Electric Imp. As long as there is someone out there who can. Eric von Hippel's texts on innovation talk about "lead users" who identify solutions for specific problems early in a technology life-cycle. If you can't find the mass-market demand for a product, it might just be that you're not in a situation where a particular technology solves your problem.
So it may not be that there is no demand for IoT tchotchkes, it may just be there's no well defined mass-market demand.
Lower Case "internet of things"
There's a joke in the Artificial Intelligence community that "Artificial Intelligence is 10 years off... and has been for the last 50 years!"
Very few people now believe we'll see early ideas of Artificial Intelligence come to fruition in our lifetimes. That is to say, we probably won't have to worry about AI's like HAL-9000 going on astronaut killing sprees anytime soon 'cause we're unlikely to see an AI that can generally simulate all aspects of human cognition.
But even though we don't have intelligent robots doing all the work we want to avoid, the study of artificial intelligence has led to some wonderful technologies like natural language processing, neural networking for image stabilization and even self-driving cars.
These spin-off technologies are often called "lower case artificial intelligence" to distinguish them from the holy grail, upper-case Artificial Intelligence people simulators like HAL-9000 or William Gibson's Wintermute.
So even if we haven't seen the benefits of "The Internet of Things," maybe products like Nest, Hone and various heart rate monitors are the lower-case "internet of things."
