[ris]

"The IoT space is a mess right now"

But is also almost entirely vapour.

Seeing this news gave me relief that Mozilla might be pulling their heads out of the clouds chasing fantastical dreams of mobile platforms, but if anything IoT is worse!

[vdnkh]

>almost entirely vapour

I work for an M2M company whose been around for 25 years now, in some form or another. M2M is the backbone of IoT and while it isn't as glamorous, it's a large space. Industrial gases, especially helium, are very lucrative right now.

[striking]

M2M makes sense. It's great for devices that are not classically connected via the Internet to communicate with each other. It's very helpful in the industrial and medical fields.

However, IoT devices should not be consumer-facing tech. IoT devices are on average far more expensive and have shoddy software/firmware. Even when the software is fixed, IoT will remain a niche range of products until their quality surpasses that of the traditional version of the product. From a business perspective, anything IoT hardly makes sense as a standalone product.

M2M is a fantastic field. But IoT is not.

[Raed667]

IoT lacks consistant "full-stack" standards. Someone as big as Mozilla could make things less messier by adopting standards on some/all layers of IoT. This is an area worth exploring "for the greater good".

[rimantas]

Foe me IoT lacks the problem that needs solving. And we do know what happens to the solutions without the problem.

[Raed667]

I'll be graduating in a few months and I study embedded/IoT. And as someone who spent the last 2 years digging in the corners of IoT, I agree that IoT can seem to be over-engineering problems that don't exist.

But the market is there, and it is huge. (mainly industrial, energy & transport applications)

IoT now is like the early personal computers, they were too expensive and almost no one knew why they needed them.

[dualogy]

Would you recommend your favourite resources for techies to dig into this space?

[Raed667]

Hard to say, there are so many.

- I'd start with embedded environments: Arduino / STM32(F1/F4) / RaspberryPi see how to code for them and how to make them talk to each other (UART/SPI/I2C/CAN...)

- Then I'd check how simple kernel modules are made, and try to mess around the kernel in raspberryPi and make something that outputs a value on the terminal and via I2C.

- I'd check the "concept" of middlewares and start by something simple WComp[0] (written in C#). It is not used in the industry but it gives you a pretty good sens of how things should work.

- For beginners I'd recommend to use Parse[1] for any project where you need a "cloud" infrastructure (Database, API, users, privileges,...)

- You should also check how fully distributed systems (that operate in a peer-to-peer manner) work.

- After that it comes to ressource optimisation and things like that.

EDIT (You should also check these) :

- UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) is way to get devices to automatically discover and understand each other.

- MQTT: publish-subscribe TCP/IP messaging protocol (I use it for push notifications)

[0] : http://www.wcomp.fr

[1] : https://www.parse.com/

[binarymax]

IoT is better for R&D now, because its going to happen (if not through a nice clean adoption but rather through sheer force of will).

Mobile was already mature with a well entrenched duopoly when FFOS began. IoT is still up for grabs.

[adrusi]

IoT is an open opportunity in general, but it doesn't really mesh with what Mozialla has done in the past.

Mozilla very well could change their focus and compete in that space, but a newcomer without any entrenched ideas would be better off. So would a big company with the resources to spin off and fund a relatively independent branch to work in IoT.

Mozilla's only big success has been Firefox. Firefox succeeded because it was competing in a market with only one other player, and that player wasn't innovating at all.

Now the browser market is different and firefox remains popular because of free software nerds, people who like its customization power (something that Mozilla is risking with its recent changes to addons, although it looks like they're treading carefully), and people who switched to it from internet explorer because their kids told them to and don't care to use Chrome.

Mozilla is good at disrupting, including both developing a superior product and getting people to care about it, but they're bad at... basically everything else, business wise. Like any organization they can get better, but doing so would require a level of change that might ultimately just make them less good at what they are good at. It seems that's what they're trying to do, and it seems that's what's happening.

gkoberger's toplevel comment[1] might offer a good opportunity. They started down this path with personas, but then abandoned it when they couldn't make developers care about it. Maybe they've lost their touch.

It pains me to say it, since they've done so much good for the things I care about, but Mozilla's time might be ending.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10698997