Who benefits from the IOT hype?
“With the IoT, we’re headed to a world where things aren’t liable to break catastrophically — or at least we’ll have a hell of a heads’ up. We’re headed to a world where our doors unlock when they sense us nearby.” — Scott Weiss, Venture Capitalist
One of the interesting aspects of a mysterious, ‘this changes everything’ kind of tech is that it polarizes opinions. There are always some stop-watch critics for any new technology, while there are also many over-enthusiasts who find it amusing. This kind of polarization is manifested in the case of the upcoming new technology platform, the Internet of Things aka IOT. Looking at things from a layman’s perspective, one can’t really see any ‘practically’ existent real life impact of IOT. Though there are examples here and there, we are still far from the true sense of ‘interconnected information driven world’. It would definitely take around a decade to know if it would really turn out to be as ground breaking as it has been hyped to be. So, the question arises, who exactly gains from all this hype around this magical three letter word? This article discusses the potential gainers from the hype around this technology and how they benefit from it.
Who benefits from popularity and how?
1. Consultants — they can smell a phenomena years ahead and use people’s fascination, fear, curiosity, zealousness or even fear to sell their services. The websites of most if not all of the big firms don’t forget to mention how IOT is going to change the business landscape and brag about their prowess in IOT; how they can help your business grow in the face of it, or better yet leverage it to have unprecedented growth.Which may be or may not be useful. When it is bundled with other offerings it becomes even more difficult to point a finger as to what worked and what did not work. However, some of the initial success stories do set good examples to follow and people to improve upon.
2. Media — there is a major spike in the Google search for the term IOT. If you check the Google Trends, you will find testimony to the amount of inquisitiveness people have for this fascinating three letter acronym. These searches lead to plethora of websites, videos, blogs,etc which publish in this context. These are some of the early cash-in avenues for the hype around this tech or any other tech for that matter. In an age of click-baits and ‘leaked’ product pre-launch information, any hype has eyeballs and earlobes to cater which definitely helps in cashing-into the halo around these buzzwords.
3. Startups — the valuation for any startup around 1999 would shoot up if they added .com to their name(ironically the perceived valuation just after the dotcom bust had an exponentially higher negative impact in the other direction). Right now many VCs have openly disclosed that they are looking for ideas related to IOT. While others would implicitly fancy an idea of being associated with the next unicorn. This would help many of the ideas get initial funding and traction they need to get ahead. However they would succeed only if they have a solid business model and create some value for the end users. Microsoft will invest $5 Billion globally on IOT over the next 5 years.
4. Development technology providers — There are many kits now available to try your hands on IOT. These kits or even individual chips, sensors, wireless trans-receivers, etc all mean very good business for the companies like ARM, Cisco, Intel, etc. There are also bigger players like IBM who want to capture the market where they can cater to the potentially millions of developers! The kits start from $10 and go upto $1000. The revenue streams are from both the hardware as well as software development kits, with the potential buyers across the globe tinkering on their boards, you can get a rough idea of the huge market around this concept.
5. Consumer electronics manufacturers — Very soon there will be proliferation of products that claim to use/abuse the concept of IOT. Many of the smart devices that essentially allow the users to use smartphones to control a lock are also claiming to be IOT. However, truly they are not yet in the spirit of IOT : the true IOT based devices would have ‘intelligent’, ‘data driven’ and ‘interconnectedness’ at their core, which is a long way to go from here.
6. Academicians — You may see many courses and micro-degree programs offered right now on various online courses platforms both in MOOC and non-MOOC formats. The formal education sector is a bit slow to pickup on trends but soon enough there will be full fledged courses being offered in the technical domains of IOT. However, that being said, education industry would benefit more from the post-hype, actualized developments from IOT than from the hype that is created.
7. Society — Can we really take a stand whether it is a hype or not? However we would be able to see in a clearer picture in retrospect, looking back at these times. As Edison said that you can’t see the value and benefits of a small baby. In the same way, I do believe that IOT is a grand idea, which may turn out to be as great as it is being speculated by some. However, in case it does not have that great impact as it is being speculated in terms like “this changes everything”. It will definitely provide people new ways to look at old problems. Some of the solutions would come through that route. Society moves forwards though experimentation and this is one of the best ideas of our times. Just like internet disrupted the business models, this could potentially do the same in future. Moreover, if you believe in the Gartner’s hype cycle then it is all about the different points of time when a tech goes through it it’s share of hype and disillusion. Let’s see where this tech journey leads to!
