Complexity is Killing the Smart Home
As a young child, I became obsessed with the idea of home automation. I attribute this fascination to shows like the Jetsons and magazines like Popular Science. If you grew up in the 90s, you know the deal.
From an early age we were exposed to a grandiose vision of flying cars, automated kitchens, and closets that can dress you. Yet, almost 30 years later, we are far from realizing this vision.
Truth be told, we’ve been stuck with a broken form of the smart home and it’s preventing mass adoption of a technology I (and so many others) have far greater expectations for.
How Did We Get Here?
For starters, this version of the smart home is over 30 years old. The personalized hub-based system started way back in the 1980s with Crestron Electronics. These systems were installed and maintained by Crestron dealers and came with a hefty price tag ($100k+).
For the wealthy, having a Crestron system was a rite of passage. It was like parking a yellow Lamborghini in the driveway — impractical, a pain in the ass to use, and cost a fortune to maintain, but was an impressive feature for neighbors to gawk at.
Over time the price of these systems, products and services have dropped. Companies such as SmartThings and Wink now offer a modern smart home system for a fraction of what Crestron cost. While the people have been saving money, they have not been saving time; the complexity of these smart home methods remain.
OK cool — so you’ve cut out the middleman responsible for all of the hard work, but what was formerly the dealer’s burden has now become the user’s problem.
Compatibility As a Service
As with most booming areas of tech, new problems open up new opportunities. Over the last five years, a rich ecosystem of installers, programmers, and tools have turned these problems into value added services.
You have integration programs like Works With Nest or Alexa Skills, compatibility standards like Z-Wave and Zigbee, Hub-and-Spoke models like Wink or SmartThings, and lastly Macro-as-a-Service companies like IFTT or Microsoft Flow.
This is exciting stuff, and is evidence that the ecosystem is growing and gaining momentum!
Unfortunately, this richer network is also more complicated and the result is that it’s harder to understand. Take two of the most popular companies in the space; Nest and Wink. They may both promote simplicity (and compatibility), yet they also push professional installation (see images below).
While striving for simplicity, why aren’t they striving for the seemingly obvious: a system the user can easily understand and install themselves?
Introducing Gall’s Law
Recently, my cousin Jason posted a link to John Gall’s wikipedia page. I quickly skimmed it while walking between meetings, but then I found myself mulling it over for the rest of the day. It states:
“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.” — John Gall (1975)
It is the idea that systems which originate in simplicity will work, and those that originate in complexity will not. This is an important idea to consider, especially in regards to the smart home industry. The industry we see today was born from a tangled web of distributors, programmers, and architects. It needs a drastic redesign or else we will never escape this maze that we have created.
Simple is Hard
When discussing simplicity, one of our developers — Ilya — brought up this infamous quote:
“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
It’s often attributed to Mark Twain or Blaise Pascal, but the author is not our concern, the sentiment is: making something simple is actually harder than making something complicated.
This is a good parallel to system design. It’s hard to make something simple and even harder to make something complicated appear simple.
What has happened to the smart home industry is, in an effort to create an easier experience, a complex network of hubs, integration services, programmers, and installers have sprung up.
In fact, several companies, like Google’s Thread or Z-Wave, that have banded together to create third-party projects focused on improving infrastructure standards. In other words, trying to create a smart home system to control all the other smart home systems you already have in your house.
It’s more of the same and it doesn’t get at the root of the problem: Complexity is killing the smart home.
It’s time for someone to approach the smart home market like Apple did with the personal computer market back in 1998. With the release of the iMac G3 they introduced the first truly simple personal computer. It ditched the industry standard Floppy Drive, relied solely on USB peripherals, and came with it’s own [built in] CRT monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
It was controversial at the time, but in retrospect this was the product that saved, and ultimately defined Apple for years to come. It was a no-frills, easy-to-understand personal computer that drove adoption and caused an industry boom.
That’s our goal with Twist — to build the world’s simplest smart home platform, so that we can make this technology accessible to more people.
Twist is free from third party integrations, takes no effort to install, and sets up in seconds (you don’t even need to remember your wifi password). We’ve built it from the ground up to ensure simplicity inspired every aspect of the product. We want to get people from point A (buying the product) to point B (using the product) as quickly and seamlessly as possible. While other companies are looking for a straight line in a labyrinth, we drew our own.
It has taken us over two years of research and development but we’re thrilled to be so close to shipping Twist to our backers. We may not be living like the Jetsons just yet, but offering people access to transformative home experiences, just by replacing their light bulbs, seems like a great place to start.
