Putting the “Internet” back in the Internet of Things
Taking pause before chasing the next Big Thing in tech
AR, VR, Machine Learning and Autonomous cars are all the rage these days. Every company wants in on it and everyone’s either doing a very good or terrible job at any one of these. But among everything there’s a little something called “IoT” that gets lost in all that noise.
The Internet of Things (IoT) has become such an ubiquitous topic nowadays that when brought into discussion most people don’t give it a second thought. If you are still in the dark as to what the Internet of Things is; you’re still not late, enlighten yourself with this awesome article.
Looking at the big picture
Almost everyone is mainly focusing on one part of the Internet of Things, and that’s the “Things” part. Every company on the planet is clamoring to have their piece of the pie while rarely looking at the big picture.
You see, “Things” already exist to a certain extent. What companies are doing is making “Things” smarter. They do this by adding a more powerful microprocessor and adding a connectivity medium to a WLAN network with access to the internet.
It’s either this or a completely unnecessary product because according to many experts in the field; “IoT isn’t IoT without a Smart Thing in it.”
So what IS the big picture?
The American research firm Gartner forecasts that there will be close to 5 billion “Connected Things” in the world by 2020.
On the whole what does this sudden flood of Smart Things mean for end users? Well in most cases it provides some form of additional functionality on the part of the devices.
If it’s a Smart Fridge, it’ll inform you when your inventory is running low or it’ll suggest healthier foods for your diet etc. If it’s a Smart TV, it would probably give you some features you would usually get from an external DVR like scheduling programs, recording and possibly even surfing the web. But this is “smartness” and novelty for the sake of “smartness” and novelty. Can these devices perform features that are more complex than some mundane tasks?
The answer would most likely be; NO.
Reason being; they don’t have and don’t require that kind of processing capability. It’s not that it’s impossible, but rather overkill to have your Smart Oven(or whatever) with the same processing power of your Smartphone.
Plus, does it really make that much of a difference even if these features were included? I mean, we’re already doing relatively fine with “Dumb Things” in our lives right?
So what actually is the big picture? What is all of this leading up to?
If it’s actually overkill and unnecessary for Smart Devices to have a lot of processing grunt what more can be done to forward the development of IoT, or have we reached its pinnacle?
A lot more needs to be done actually.
Simply put; the Internet of Things will be nothing more than just several billion Smart Things unless we get the most crucial part of it right.
And by the title of this post, you might have already guessed it; it’s the “Internet” part. The part that would allow devices to actually “talk” with each other.
Devices that talk together, work together.
If you think about it, a single Honey Bee isn’t that much of a powerful entity. But a Hive of bees is a formidable force. And the secret of any Hive in the Animal kingdom is co-operation. And a similar theory can be translated to IoT devices too.
“Inter device connectivity” is the name of the game.
Even some manufacturers who have long ignored this aspect have finally realized that Smart Devices in their own vacuum makes little sense and have started implementing a little bit of inter device connectivity of their own.
But upon further inspection it becomes clear that all what this kind inter-operability does is make Smartphone a glorified remote. A remote that can control stuff through WiFi. Its accompanied with an app that does just that; emulate a remote.
The few companies that have successfully done a certain job of getting Things working include the likes of Samsung and Apple. But one of the largest issues that a user encounters when buying a Smart Device nowadays is that they buy into an ecosystem rather than seamless experience.
Ecosystem for Sale
Apple is the most guilty of this. But their logic is justified by a pretty valid reason. They want total end to end control which they believe delivers a better user experience overall. While true for the most part it does sacrifice a crucial component of UX; freedom.
If you buy one Apple product you’re basically getting a sub-par experience if the other devices you have are not manufactured or supported by Apple.
While sometimes this is intentional, with manufacturers literally forcing users to buy other devices made by them(for obvious reasons), quite often this is due to issues with the underlying architecture(or the software glue between devices).
All Proprietary
Speaking about ecosystem entrapment, it can’t be left out that no manufacturer would be charitable enough to ever release the full source code of their devices or their platform to the public. They would release APIs, developer tools, documentation and such but never the full code.
Even most PaaS providers are reluctant to fully disclose details. But why should this matter?
Because the Internet is built atop FOSS(Free and Open Source Software).
No one person or organization has ownership for technologies or governorship of the Internet. Therefore the more open the platform code is, the more room there is for collaboration and growth.
Before Linux came along the world was a very different place. The Open Source kernel is so ubiquitous that nowadays you couldn’t so much as fart without coming across something running some form of the kernel.
Plus Linux gave birth to Android, and we all know how that went…
Developer woes
With the currently growing maker movement and emergence of Open Source hardware solutions such as Raspberry Pi and Arduino there’s a ton of independent developers who are tinkering, innovating and working on great products. But again the problem arises when they try to pick a platform to integrate whatever they are building.
There’s more than enough lightweight device Operating Systems from various vendors all touting the most cutting edge features and capabilities but all tied to their own cloud vendor and proprietary backend. The vendors don’t want you to know it but that’s the way it is, and it’s usually too late when you figure it out. Vendor lock-in is all but certain in those instances.
Once that happens, the manufacturer of the device is essentially trapped serving for a vendor they don’t like, using a platform they can’t escape.
TL;DR?
If you list out the reasons that device interoperability in IoT has suffered so far, we can cite the following reasons (in no particular order);
- Manufacturers intentionally building devices to trap users in their ecosystem
- Little to no FOSS platforms that are geared especially towards interoperability of IoT devices.
- Developers and Independent device manufacturers are prone to eventually fall into vendor lock-in when selecting a OS for their device.
With all these issues it’s clear that an external party is needed who deals specifically with the “software glue” side of things without a bias for any single vendor or cloud platform.
So the next time you start building your smart device, don’t forget that whatever your building is yours and yours alone. And your device is only as good as how well it plays with other devices and talks with the world around it :)
