[paulojreis]

> There's an easy way to check: let's see what sells. > > Last time I checked, mildly smart home "robots", like automatic cookers, dishwashers, washing machines, even vacuum cleaners sold rather well, and were widely adopted.

Do you have proper data to claim this? Good sales and wide adoption? And how can you be sure that the buyers are "everyday people", not techno-enthusiasts and early adopters?

I mean: it is rather "easy" to see a big increase in sales for a given technology, when it is "young". The big question is how sustained that growth will be, when the early adopters are served and the company needs to target "regular" people.

[sp332]

I thought it was pretty obvious, but here are some numbers for you. According to http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File?item=UGFyZW50SUQ9N... over 300,000 people had installed the Crock-Pot app for iOS by 2010. It costs $3.99 so that's $399,000 in app sales, plus whatever happened in the last 4 years.

Around 75% of homes in the US have a dishwasher. Nearly 20 million dishwashers are sold in the USA each year. http://qz.com/29147/death-of-a-dishwasher-families-around-th... For comparison, only 5 million homes are sold in the US each year, so it's not just that they come with houses and are never used.

[NovaS1X]

>And how can you be sure that the buyers are "everyday people", not techno-enthusiasts and early adopters?

I don't think it matters. The future of smart-devices is looking good of a number of reasons and this is why more than a few people think that smart-devices are going to see widespread adoption.

"Everyday people" don't need to be the ones adopting this widely just yet. There's a trend in the evolution of technology where people don't know that they want/need a specific technology until they've been shown the power of it. "Everyday people" never asked for Home PCs; they were pushed to them and now it's hard to imagine life without a home computer. "Everyday people" never asked for smartphones; they were pushed by technology companies and now they're almost a mandatory device for navigating modern culture.

I think smart-devices will see the same fate. There is a lot of talk and development into IoT and technologists see the power of such networks even if "everyday people" do not. Smart-devices are a natural progression of IoT and the other devices everyone already has in their pockets. I think it will be adopted in the same way other technologies have: It will see small, and then large-scale adoption in a niche area, people will see the power of IoT and smart-devices, and then people will begin to want it everywhere. This will be driven by technologist support and marketing.

The article may have presented the outcome a little optimistic but I don't then they're far off the mark.

[xg15]

This was certainly true for the past, but I'm not sure you can extrapolate for the future. The events of the recent years have given the public not just a sense of the power of technology but also its negative side.

At least here in germany, the Snowden relevations have done a good deal to make people realize just much much data about them is on their net and how hard it is to control access to it.

Revelations like Apple using iPhones for large scale profiling of location histories and (much later) Samsung having its TVs report home with a history of viewed programs didn't put smart devices in a good light either.

In parallel, numerous hacker and data leak scandals taught the public that maybe data entrusted to the cloud isn't as secure as everyone promised.

Finally, many people only now start to realize just how much a paradigm shift the internet really caused and what some of the psychological and sociological implications might be: There is the (still vaguely defined) "internet" or "mobile addiction", there is the growing trend of viewing phone usage (or usage of other devices, i.e. Google Glass) during social gatherings as impolite, there is the whole discussion about what role privacy should play in the future, etc, etc.

All of this doesn't stop people from buying new phones, TVs, fitness bands, etc. But depending on who you ask, they do it with a growing bad conscience. If you try to introduce new technologies that have a higher cost and less obvious benefits (like smart homes), it might have an effect.