A few weeks ago I spent several days marching around CES in Las Vegas (along with close to 200,000 other people), and as in previous years I saw 'smart' versions of just about anything you can imagine and many you can't. I also heard just about any thesis you can imagine, from 'this is all nonsense' to 'this is the next platform and voice-based AI will transform our homes and replace the smartphone.'
I'm not quite sure what my grand unified thesis on 'smart home' is, but I think there are some building blocks to try to get closer to one:
Let's start with 'why?'
Why?
My grandparents could probably have told you how many electric motors they owned. There were one or two in the car, one in the fridge, one in the vacuum cleaner and so on, and they owned maybe a dozen in total. Today, we have no idea how many motors we have (or even how many are in a car), but we probably know how many things we own with a network connection or some kind of digital intelligence. There's a phone, and a tablet, and a laptop, and the TV, and... but again, our children will have no idea. It won't be an interesting question. "How many smart devices do you have?" will be like asking how many incandescent lightbulbs you have.
Many of the things that get a connection or become 'smart' in some way will seem silly to us, just as many things that got 'electrified' would seem silly to our grandparents - tell them that you have a button to adjust the mirrors on your car, or a machine to chop vegetables, and they'd think you were soft in the head, but that's how the deployment of the technology happened, and how it will happen again. The technology will be there, and will become very very cheap, so it will slide unnoticed into our lives. On the other hand, many things that people did think might get electrified did not, and many of the ideas that did work were not adopted in a uniform way. Most people in the UK have an electric kettle, but that's not true in the USA, and most people in Japan have a rice cooker, but this in turn isn't true in the UK. Anyone who's baked a few times has bought an electric whisk for $20, but not many people use electric carving knives.
The smart home, or connected home, or internet of things (choose your term) will probably look much the same. Electrical components became cheap commodities that let people experiment with all sorts of ideas - today, the smartphone supply chain is a firehose of cheap commodity components that, again, let people experiment with all sorts of ideas for smart things. Some will work, some won't, but our children will take the ones that do work for granted.
Though this determinist model of deployment will be much the same for smart things as for electricity, there is a difference in the character of what might get created. Washing machines and vacuum cleaners saved huge amounts of time and effort - they replaced entire jobs and liberated people from drudgery. Televisions take over hours of your time, for better or worse. In post-war Japan a television, refrigerator and washing machine were sometimes half-jokingly called 'the three sacred treasures'. No-one would really call a smart light switch or a digital thermostat a treasure. Many smart home devices do not look as though they're solving the same magnitude of problem (which is one reason people can get quite upset looking at some of these experiments).
But if a connected light switch isn't a treasure, neither is an electric kettle. You can put a kettle on a stove, turn on the heat, wait for it to boil, turn off the heat and pour your tea. You could even use a saucepan. But a cheap electric kettle is much faster and turns off automatically when it's ready. So, pretty much everyone who drinks tea owns one. Taking the analogy further, you could say the same about a simple vegetable peeler. Of course you could peel fruit and vegetables with a kitchen knife - you idiot! - but the tenth time that half of the apple and a small part of your thumb end up in the sink, you pick one up for $3 at the supermarket. An electric kettle or a vegetable peeler don't save hours of your day or free you from drudgery - they just remove a tiny piece of friction a few times every single day for the rest of your life.
Today, the world of smart devices is trying to discover quite what other pieces of friction it might be able to address. By their nature, these often don't look like a problem at all until you automate them away - any more than adjusting your wing mirror by hand did. Some of them don't even look like a problem when you point them out - my grandmother could not understand why anyone would buy a dishwasher. Lots of pieces of friction are going to go away.
How might that discovery work? If we're looking for things that take not hours of people's time but little pieces of unnoticed friction, where do you start? One useful model, perhaps, is to look for questions. There's an old line that a computer should never ask a question if it should be able to work out the answer, so what are the questions in our home? Well, when I go into my bathroom, do I want the light turned on? The answer is always yes, so why do I have to press the light switch? When I walk up to my front door, do I want it to be locked? The answer is always no, so why do I need to take a bunch of little pieces of carved metal out of my pocket, pick the right one and put it into a slot? When the kettle is boiling, do I want it to continue boiling until it's dry? No, so turn off the heat. I'm baking something, and I want the oven pre-heated, do I want to fiddle with buttons, or just tell it to turn on and heat to 350 degrees? If I run out of pods for my automatic coffee machine, do I want to order more? Yes, so why ask? (...)
One system or many?
Should everything 'smart' in my home talk to everything else, and perhaps be controlled through one unified UI? The obvious answer is 'of course it will all be one system' but really, it depends what they are, and on what the right way to interact with that device itself might be. Some things would ideally need no interaction at all, some need to be interacted with directly, some can be controlled remotely, and some might get some value from talking to other devices but others might not. And many might fit into several of these. (...)
Part of the challenge is that very few people will convert their entire existing home to 'smart' all in one go, even if all of the possible products were available. You might buy a smart door lock or camera, or thermostat, but you probably won't replace all the light switches, plug sockets, locks, blinds and appliances at the same time. Many of those other things are on long replacement cycles - we buy new smartphones every two to three years, but fridges and water heaters last for a decade or two. If you want people to replace a 'dumb' thing with a 'smart' thing, then either you must fit into the existing replacement cycle for that thing, or that thing must be cheap enough to be replaced off-cycle. You can keep a garage door opener for 20 years or buy a new smart one now, but no-one will replace a two-year-old fridge just to get a smart one.
This means adoption overall will take a long time no matter how much sense you think it makes, but it also means that most smart things have to make sense as a single thing by themselves without being part of a larger system. 'Would it be good if I could have one voice control for all my lights, the curtains, blinds, doors, heating oven and music system?' is a different question to ''do I want that light, and the washing machine (but not the dryer) to be controlled by Alexa?' This makes some use cases more difficult, but it's also why so many of these things tend to have their own app, or (on the larger devices) their own screen and user interface. The theoretical end-state might be no UI except a unified voice system, but you can't sell an oven with no controls on the front today.
You can see this challenge in the way that the industry (or rather industries) are trying to implement it: if the consumer model is pretty unclear, there is an awful lot of industry push, but that comes with lots of bases being covered at once. Google, Apple and Amazon would obviously like there to be one UI, controlled by them, for reasons I'll return to later. The motivations of Samsung and LG, the Silicon Valley company making a door camera, and the hundreds of Shenzhen companies each churning out 50 different things, are a little more mixed. (...)
Many of these device categories (smart light switches, say) will be commodity products using commodity components - some categories will have 50 companies making near-identical devices. These companies will embrace Alexa/Google Assistant/Homekit because it gives them a commodity front-end as well, just as Android did for phones.
Conversely, a Silicon Valley startup trying to make a device in this world has to find a way to make something that cannot easily be copied, and since it mostly uses the same components as everyone else that generally means something to do with the software. So, is there a network effect? A cloud service? Something with the use of aggregated data across all the devices? Or, do you have a route-to-market advantage? If not, then your whole category will probably go to the incumbents - generic ‘consumer electronics’ devices (baby cameras, say) will go to Shenzhen and washing machines will go to the washing machine companies, where smart becomes just another high-end feature. The challenge for the startup is that if I can control your device entirely with Alexa or Siri, you don't have much of a moat left, but if you don't support them, won't people just buy a generic Chinese one that does? How do you square the circle?
You can see a fascinating case study of this question in connected door locks. Is it harder for the incumbent lock companies, with all their manufacturing scale and route-to-market advantages, to learn how to add ‘smart’, than for software companies to learn how to make a good lock at scale and get it into the channel? Is there enough work to the user experience of a lock that it’s harder for Yale than for a startup? is there a network effect?
That is, is a connected lock really a piece of software wrapped in metal and plastic, or is it just a better lock?
So far, it’s an open question. Again, though, if this does become an Alexa use case, that’s good for Yale - they can go back to worrying about competing with Schlage (and the Chinese entrants they've been thinking about for a decade or more) and let Amazon and Google worry about the network and the UX.
That takes me to the third question - if everything is Alexa, or Google Assistant, or Siri, so what? If everyone does buy lots of these devices, and they are all connected into a central assistant UI of some kind, so what? How much leverage would that give - how much ecosystem power?
I'm not quite sure what my grand unified thesis on 'smart home' is, but I think there are some building blocks to try to get closer to one:
- Will people buy 'smart' anything at all? Will people buy a whole lot of smart things, or just one or two (for example, a door lock, a thermostat and nothing else). Why?
- If they do buy more than a handful of things, will they all be connected into one system, with a voice front end?
- Finally, if lots of people do have three dozen smart things all connected to Alexa (or Siri, or Google), does that change the broader tech environment? Does it result in massive company creation? Does it give, say, Amazon a major platform advantage - is the end result anything more than the sale of a bunch of ultra-low-margin generic Shenzhen boxes and a small reduction in the number of people cancelling Amazon Prime?
Let's start with 'why?'
Why?
My grandparents could probably have told you how many electric motors they owned. There were one or two in the car, one in the fridge, one in the vacuum cleaner and so on, and they owned maybe a dozen in total. Today, we have no idea how many motors we have (or even how many are in a car), but we probably know how many things we own with a network connection or some kind of digital intelligence. There's a phone, and a tablet, and a laptop, and the TV, and... but again, our children will have no idea. It won't be an interesting question. "How many smart devices do you have?" will be like asking how many incandescent lightbulbs you have.
Many of the things that get a connection or become 'smart' in some way will seem silly to us, just as many things that got 'electrified' would seem silly to our grandparents - tell them that you have a button to adjust the mirrors on your car, or a machine to chop vegetables, and they'd think you were soft in the head, but that's how the deployment of the technology happened, and how it will happen again. The technology will be there, and will become very very cheap, so it will slide unnoticed into our lives. On the other hand, many things that people did think might get electrified did not, and many of the ideas that did work were not adopted in a uniform way. Most people in the UK have an electric kettle, but that's not true in the USA, and most people in Japan have a rice cooker, but this in turn isn't true in the UK. Anyone who's baked a few times has bought an electric whisk for $20, but not many people use electric carving knives.The smart home, or connected home, or internet of things (choose your term) will probably look much the same. Electrical components became cheap commodities that let people experiment with all sorts of ideas - today, the smartphone supply chain is a firehose of cheap commodity components that, again, let people experiment with all sorts of ideas for smart things. Some will work, some won't, but our children will take the ones that do work for granted.
Though this determinist model of deployment will be much the same for smart things as for electricity, there is a difference in the character of what might get created. Washing machines and vacuum cleaners saved huge amounts of time and effort - they replaced entire jobs and liberated people from drudgery. Televisions take over hours of your time, for better or worse. In post-war Japan a television, refrigerator and washing machine were sometimes half-jokingly called 'the three sacred treasures'. No-one would really call a smart light switch or a digital thermostat a treasure. Many smart home devices do not look as though they're solving the same magnitude of problem (which is one reason people can get quite upset looking at some of these experiments).
But if a connected light switch isn't a treasure, neither is an electric kettle. You can put a kettle on a stove, turn on the heat, wait for it to boil, turn off the heat and pour your tea. You could even use a saucepan. But a cheap electric kettle is much faster and turns off automatically when it's ready. So, pretty much everyone who drinks tea owns one. Taking the analogy further, you could say the same about a simple vegetable peeler. Of course you could peel fruit and vegetables with a kitchen knife - you idiot! - but the tenth time that half of the apple and a small part of your thumb end up in the sink, you pick one up for $3 at the supermarket. An electric kettle or a vegetable peeler don't save hours of your day or free you from drudgery - they just remove a tiny piece of friction a few times every single day for the rest of your life.
Today, the world of smart devices is trying to discover quite what other pieces of friction it might be able to address. By their nature, these often don't look like a problem at all until you automate them away - any more than adjusting your wing mirror by hand did. Some of them don't even look like a problem when you point them out - my grandmother could not understand why anyone would buy a dishwasher. Lots of pieces of friction are going to go away.
How might that discovery work? If we're looking for things that take not hours of people's time but little pieces of unnoticed friction, where do you start? One useful model, perhaps, is to look for questions. There's an old line that a computer should never ask a question if it should be able to work out the answer, so what are the questions in our home? Well, when I go into my bathroom, do I want the light turned on? The answer is always yes, so why do I have to press the light switch? When I walk up to my front door, do I want it to be locked? The answer is always no, so why do I need to take a bunch of little pieces of carved metal out of my pocket, pick the right one and put it into a slot? When the kettle is boiling, do I want it to continue boiling until it's dry? No, so turn off the heat. I'm baking something, and I want the oven pre-heated, do I want to fiddle with buttons, or just tell it to turn on and heat to 350 degrees? If I run out of pods for my automatic coffee machine, do I want to order more? Yes, so why ask? (...)
One system or many?
Should everything 'smart' in my home talk to everything else, and perhaps be controlled through one unified UI? The obvious answer is 'of course it will all be one system' but really, it depends what they are, and on what the right way to interact with that device itself might be. Some things would ideally need no interaction at all, some need to be interacted with directly, some can be controlled remotely, and some might get some value from talking to other devices but others might not. And many might fit into several of these. (...)
Part of the challenge is that very few people will convert their entire existing home to 'smart' all in one go, even if all of the possible products were available. You might buy a smart door lock or camera, or thermostat, but you probably won't replace all the light switches, plug sockets, locks, blinds and appliances at the same time. Many of those other things are on long replacement cycles - we buy new smartphones every two to three years, but fridges and water heaters last for a decade or two. If you want people to replace a 'dumb' thing with a 'smart' thing, then either you must fit into the existing replacement cycle for that thing, or that thing must be cheap enough to be replaced off-cycle. You can keep a garage door opener for 20 years or buy a new smart one now, but no-one will replace a two-year-old fridge just to get a smart one.
This means adoption overall will take a long time no matter how much sense you think it makes, but it also means that most smart things have to make sense as a single thing by themselves without being part of a larger system. 'Would it be good if I could have one voice control for all my lights, the curtains, blinds, doors, heating oven and music system?' is a different question to ''do I want that light, and the washing machine (but not the dryer) to be controlled by Alexa?' This makes some use cases more difficult, but it's also why so many of these things tend to have their own app, or (on the larger devices) their own screen and user interface. The theoretical end-state might be no UI except a unified voice system, but you can't sell an oven with no controls on the front today.
You can see this challenge in the way that the industry (or rather industries) are trying to implement it: if the consumer model is pretty unclear, there is an awful lot of industry push, but that comes with lots of bases being covered at once. Google, Apple and Amazon would obviously like there to be one UI, controlled by them, for reasons I'll return to later. The motivations of Samsung and LG, the Silicon Valley company making a door camera, and the hundreds of Shenzhen companies each churning out 50 different things, are a little more mixed. (...)
Many of these device categories (smart light switches, say) will be commodity products using commodity components - some categories will have 50 companies making near-identical devices. These companies will embrace Alexa/Google Assistant/Homekit because it gives them a commodity front-end as well, just as Android did for phones.
Conversely, a Silicon Valley startup trying to make a device in this world has to find a way to make something that cannot easily be copied, and since it mostly uses the same components as everyone else that generally means something to do with the software. So, is there a network effect? A cloud service? Something with the use of aggregated data across all the devices? Or, do you have a route-to-market advantage? If not, then your whole category will probably go to the incumbents - generic ‘consumer electronics’ devices (baby cameras, say) will go to Shenzhen and washing machines will go to the washing machine companies, where smart becomes just another high-end feature. The challenge for the startup is that if I can control your device entirely with Alexa or Siri, you don't have much of a moat left, but if you don't support them, won't people just buy a generic Chinese one that does? How do you square the circle?
You can see a fascinating case study of this question in connected door locks. Is it harder for the incumbent lock companies, with all their manufacturing scale and route-to-market advantages, to learn how to add ‘smart’, than for software companies to learn how to make a good lock at scale and get it into the channel? Is there enough work to the user experience of a lock that it’s harder for Yale than for a startup? is there a network effect?
That is, is a connected lock really a piece of software wrapped in metal and plastic, or is it just a better lock?
So far, it’s an open question. Again, though, if this does become an Alexa use case, that’s good for Yale - they can go back to worrying about competing with Schlage (and the Chinese entrants they've been thinking about for a decade or more) and let Amazon and Google worry about the network and the UX.
That takes me to the third question - if everything is Alexa, or Google Assistant, or Siri, so what? If everyone does buy lots of these devices, and they are all connected into a central assistant UI of some kind, so what? How much leverage would that give - how much ecosystem power?
by Benedict Evans | Read more:
Image: uncredited
