Keeping your house dumb is the smart move
Recent stories around the Revolv shutdown by Nest/Google have added more attention to the issue of smart gadgets in the home. These devices have promised to make our homes smarter, our preferences automatic, and in general make life better. So far however, it seems that the intersection of internet cloud connected devices and home infrastructure has not been a success.
To understand why, I think its useful to split the types of devices in the home labeled as “smart” in to two general buckets. First there are devices which function in a non-critical way for entertainment or extensions of existing function (ex. Amazon Echo, smart lightbulbs). On the other side are devices which function in a critical way as part of your home’s infrastructure (ex. locks, thermostats, major appliances). I’ll refer to the first group as toys and the second as tools.
When you consider the possible issues with these devices you have to be much more weary of tools than toys. If your Amazon Echo suddenly bricks the worst that can happen is you might miss an alarm you set to wake you up for work. On the other hand, if your Nest thermostat dies overnight suddenly your furnace doesn’t work anymore. Similarly if your internet connected lock fails, you won’t be getting inside without your trusty meat-space key. When a toy fails, you move on to something else. When a tool fails it usually means you have a significant problem.
We have all grown somewhat accustomed to the fickle nature of our electronic devices. Whether it be software bugs requiring updates or random ghosts in the machine requiring a reboot. We accept these issues because the gadgets are either so useful to warrant the maintenance or so unimportant that we ignore having to buy a new one. But when those same characteristics meet the world of home refrigerators and cars, our expectations clash with a different domain entirely. Appliances and home controls are a world where hardware lasts for a decade or more. Your fridge has probably been quietly working for longer than most technology companies have existed. Your thermostat probably hasn’t been replaced since the home was built. These devices are so reliable that you probably don’t think of them as electronic devices at all. They are appliances, and in your mind that means unchanging permanence.
In contrast to the plethora of smart home startups, GE and Whirlpool have built their brands on this idea of unchanging reliability. Both companies each represent more than a 100 years of experience building consumer products, yet they haven’t had any breakout smart home products. For more than two decades, these companies have invested R&D and marketing dollars pushing the idea of connected appliances doing more than their less capable alternatives. Yet it remains a footnote in their product catalog and rounding error in their sales reports. You could argue this is just the fact that old stodgy industries can’t cope with the new fast paced technology culture and that is why you should instead look to Nest, Amazon, and Apple for the future. But I think that discredits the old guys too much and the new players are reading from the same failed script.
Since the 1960s and 70s Americans have had a fascination with the home of the future. Or perhaps, more accurately, companies have had a fascination with trying to sell the home of the future to their customers. Companies have tried again and again to solve every problem and provide every convenience with technology. But ultimately there has been little to no adoption. A kitchen today would look perfectly familiar to a family from the 1970s despite three decades of exponential technology growth. The only difference might be a tablet replacing the stack of cookbooks.
Interestingly, the benefits from these early innovations often required a whole house solution, and this all-or-nothing approach seemed to be the problem.
When you try to integrate disparate technologies into an all-encompassing system, the barrier to entry seems much greater than it is for individual, single-purpose products. — Stephen Melman, Director of Economic Services NAHB
So the encompassing system approach didn’t work in the 80s and is still a problem today. In 1997 an AP story was written about the home of the future (in this case 2000). A key comment from the article
The real question is whether the time, money and bother they represent is justified. If you like tinkering and gadgets, it might be. But if you just want to get through the day with a minimum of hassle and a maximum of time and money saved, sometimes the old-fashioned ways work fine
— Elizabeth Weise AP
Both of these quotes were written decades ago, but they could have been written today. Vendor lock-in and whole home solutions continue to be the default approach and in general you can still expect more hassle with “smart” appliances than the dumber variety.
Given this bleak outlook, what would need to change for smart home tools to go from eccentric to mainstream. I think the answer is open standards. Open standards would punish vendor-lock in the marketplace and ensure that focus could be put on making better products rather than just more products. The best success story of this is likely a technology you are using while reading this article. When looking for an ideal result, look no farther than WiFi. WiFi didn’t happen by chance and it could have failed had things gone differently. Instead nearly every new consumer device on the market has a cheap, reliable and backwards compatible WiFi chip.
Attempts at a viable standard for home automation have been made, brands like Zigbee, Zwave, Insteon and others have entered and established niche segments of the market. Unfortunately the standards weren’t open enough and suffered from compatibility issues, poor implementations and proprietary biases. Each company knows there is money to be made in controlling the standard and thus each company has an incentive to not play nice with others. The result is a morass of generally crummy devices made by companies selling their own walled-gardens. No company can afford to specialize so they all try to do everything. In the mix are a bunch of third-party aggregators trying to sell software and devices that will knit your various proprietary technologies together. Revolv was one of these and it got shutdown by Nest who is more interested in maintaining their walled-garden approach.
Until this changes, my advice is to stick with your dumb appliances, thermostats, and light switches. You will save money and as a bonus, make yourself much less prone to digital security threats. Consider even extolling the virtues of a light switch that works when the internet is down (it is a feature after all). Meanwhile avoid the dystopian future of fridges advertising food to you. When the opportunity comes along to buy into open standards versus proprietary ones, vote with your pocketbook.
