Why Do Refrigerators Need Wi-Fi?
(Note: This article was originally posted on LinkedIn by Barry Po, Brilliant Digital’s Founder & Principal, in January 2018 during CES).
CES 2018 takes center stage this week and if first reveals are any indication, it’s going to a banner year for AI, IoT devices, and smart assistants.
Among just the few I’ve personally seen in the last 24 hours — Samsung announced an 85-inch “smart” TV that uses AI to upscale video to 8K. Insurance carrier Aflac partnered with Sproutel to build a robot therapy duck designed to help children with cancer communicate how they feel. And GE announced a 27-inch tablet for the kitchen that they hope will become a “family hub” for all their branded home appliances.
Indeed, connected devices are all the rage. It seems that every new product announcement includes Internet connectivity as tech companies look for ways to stand out from the competition. Here, I wonder if a little bit of perspective can be a useful thing: how did we get to a point where your refrigerator asks you for your Wi-Fi password, and more importantly, who’s asking for this stuff anyway?
Despite what the product marketing that follows these announcements often say, the drive toward connected devices is not about cultivating a better user experience, or uncovering new use cases that make our lives better (though some certainly do exist). Instead, it seems to be more of a battle to win exclusivity over parts of our homes, our schedules, and our lives.
We’re getting into the next iteration of ecosystem-led warfare. The real competition isn’t over creating the most compelling, innovative products — it’s a race to see who will be first to get us locked into branded ecosystems and platforms that are hard to get away from. Such customer stickiness is designed to win over shareholders, perhaps at the expense of the customer.
Today, the practice of creating technology to solve problems no one has seems to be live and well — and tells us why so many IoT-enabled products fail to resonate. When we forget that the essence of technology is solving real problems (by at least one dictionary definition “the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes”), we’ll continue to be guilty of perpetuating the reputation that much of the tech industry is fuelled solely by hype.
Developing opportunities to vertically integrate through an ecosystem can be a good thing for customer experience (as companies such as Apple have shown), but it can’t be the foundation on which products are created. This is how we get products like Wi-Fi enabled slow cookers (isn’t the whole point of a slow cooker to set it and forget it?).
I think there’s a better way, and it’s one we’ve known all along: let’s be relentless about building stuff that people actually care about. If we want to be successful in creating value through technology, understanding the customers and markets we seek to serve will beat hype and deliberate monetization strategies any day.
