Nice intro by Benedict Evans in his most recent post:
My grandfather could probably have told you how many electric motors he owned. There was one in the car, one in the fridge, one in his drill and so on.
My father, when I was a child, might have struggled to list all the motors he owned (how many, exactly, are in a car?) but could have told you how many devices were in the house that had a chip in.
Today, I have no idea how many device I own with a chip, but I could tell you how many have a network connection. And I doubt my children will know that, in their turn.
I woke up thinking about the Internet Of Things today. And I was thinking about something that Benedict talks about in his post – whether the brains of the “things” will be in the “things” or in the cloud or in the smartphone. Benedict thinks we will see all of those models co-existing. I am not so sure. There are tremendous cost benefits to using compute cycles and storage on smartphones or in the cloud. The old timesharing model lives again. And, as Benedict touches on, it will be easier to connect all the intelligence coming from these “things” in our lives if the data and the compute cycles are in the same place.
So my bet is that most “things” will be dumb and the smarts will be in the phone or in the cloud. At least that’s what I woke up thinking about today.
