According to a survey last year, less than 50% of appliances that are internet-capable ever get connected. When I talk to manufacturers, I often hear even worse numbers, sometimes below 30%! Despite many years and billions of dollars of investment into the “Internet of Things”, this lack of adoption makes it clear that even if a device can be connected, consumers don’t see the value in most cases. I think it’s time to admit that the core idea of IoT has failed. To understand why, it’s worth looking at how it was originally pitched, and what flaws time has revealed in those arguments.

The idea of an internet of everyday devices has been around for decades, but its definition has always been centered on connecting electronics to a network. This is superficially sensible, because we’ve seen internet-connected devices overtake standalone equivalents in everything from mainframes, to personal computers, and finally to phones. Sun coined the phrase “The network is the computer”, and that philosophy has clearly won in most domains, from Salesforce pioneering Software as a Service, to the majority of user applications today being delivered as web or mobile apps with a data-center-based backend. Given this history, it makes sense that the world of embedded systems, the billions of tiny, cheap, microcontrollers in everything from cars to toasters, would be revolutionized by a similar switch to network-reliant technologies. So, why has this approach failed?

Setup

The biggest obstacle is the setup tax. All of our communication technologies, from WiFi to cellular, cost money to use, and so require authentication and billing accounts. This isn’t as big a problem with PCs and phones because we only replace them every few years, and they have screens and keyboards, so going through the setup process is comparatively straightforward. By comparison, your fridge or toaster probably doesn’t have a full-featured user interface, and so you’re expected to download a phone app, and then use that to indirectly set up your appliance. This adds multiple extra steps, and anyone who’s ever worked on a customer funnel means that every additional stage means losing some people along the way. If you also factor in that a household might have dozens of different devices that all want you to go through the same process, with different applications, accounts, and quirks, it’s clear why people suffer from setup fatigue and often don’t even try.

Uselessness

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” — Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park.

Last year I talked to an engineer who had spent six months working on a smart dishwasher that could be connected to the internet. He confessed that none of the team had been able to figure out a compelling user benefit for the system. You could start the dishwasher remotely, but how did that help if you had to be there in person to load it? Knowing when it was done was mildly useful, but most people would know that from when they started it. With phones and PCs adding an internet connection unlocked immediately compelling use cases, thanks to all the human-readable content on web pages, and once the network was widely available more applications like Salesforce or Uber added to the appeal. We’ve never seen anything like this for IoT in the consumer space. Getting an alert that your fridge door has been left open is nice, but isn’t much better than having an audible alarm go off. Amazon, Apple, and Google have tried to use voice interfaces as a selling point for devices to connect through their ecosystem, but almost nobody uses them for anything other than setting alarms and playing songs. There’s also no inherent reason to send audio data to the cloud to have a voice interface, one of the reasons we founded Useful was to bring local speech interfaces to everyday objects. People need a motivation to connect their devices, especially with the time cost involved in setup, and nobody has given them one.

Energy

The final nail in IoT’s coffin is a bit more subtle and technical than the first two. Unless you want to run ethernet cables everywhere, a network connection requires radio communication, through Bluetooth, WiFi, or cellular data. All of these technologies need at least 100 milliwatts of power to run continuously. This isn’t much when you are connected to a mains power supply, but you’ll quickly run down anything battery-powered. There’s a reason you need to charge your phone and wearables every day. The philosophy of “The network is the computer” requires that you can access a data center with low enough latency that you can treat the cloud as just another component of your system. If you need to wait seconds for it to become available, and if it’s so hungry for precious resources that you can’t use it routinely, the programming model that allows phone and desktop apps to seamlessly integrate with remote servers breaks down. Ubiquitous, always-on network connectivity makes writing software so much easier, because you can always tap into a deep pool of compute and data as if it were local. That’s a big reason why the cloud has eaten the regular software world over the last two decades. A costly, intermittent connection removes that advantage.

You might argue that the consumer IoT should be focused on mains-powered devices, but that’s a very limited vision, since there are only so many appliances you want to plug in, and being able to run on batteries or energy harvesting opens up the possibility of there being hundreds or even thousands of sensors per person. The energy costs behind radio transmission don’t seem to be improving very fast, so I believe this will continue to be a barrier to the IoT ideal.

What’s next?

Believe it or not, I’m still optimistic about the future of embedded technology! I just get frustrated that a superficial analogy to previous technology cycles has focused so much academic and commercial attention on bringing an internet connection to everyday objects. Instead, I think it will be much more fruitful to spend our time tackling issues users actually care about, like why do I have five remotes on my couch, or why doesn’t my TV turn on instantly like it used to years ago? Most of the issues that are frustrating people with consumer electronics don’t need a network connection to solve. I’d much rather have us building machines that can understand us better, and figure out the monetization strategy after we’re providing value, instead of building features nobody uses because we think they can make money.