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Some of these features probably lead actual usage. If you'd asked in 2009 how many people wanted to adjust their air conditioner temperature remotely, command t

Some of these features probably lead actual usage. If you'd asked in 2009 how many people wanted to adjust their air conditioner temperature remotely, command their vacuum to clean, or see video of their front door when the delivery driver drops off a package, I'd bet those numbers would be low, but we today have IoT poster children like Nest, Roomba, and Ring making those desirable features.

HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
> Some of these features probably lead actual usage This is an interesting comment and from my experience I'm sure it's often true. Around 2008 or thereabouts I was the lead engineer on my company's first foray into what is now called IIoT: Industrial Internet of Things. At the time we just called it Remote Monitoring. There was (is?) even an magazine by that name. We built large, complex medical instruments that required periodic servicing both by the customer and by our Field Engineers. Engineering's value proposition for the project to the Technical Support/Field Service group was that we could reduce the frequency of expensive and unscheduled field service callouts and provide considerably more debug information from an instrument when a customer called in with a problem. We should be able to reduce diagnosing an instrument failure from hours to minutes. And in the future, we'd probably be able to tell when a consumable part was due for replacement and schedule it ahead of time. It was a freaking battle uphill both ways in the snow to get them to accept that. All they wanted was a slightly faster version of the tool they already had which was already inadequate for the task. They couldn't actually stop us from implementing this, but there a a strong reluctance to the point of "well it sounds nice but I don't see how it would be helpful to us." Postmortem: Fast forward two years. The system is in the field. Tech support keeps telling us how they can't imagine that they were able to get along without it and keep asking for new features!
nitwit005 4y ago
Perhaps if you asked people randomly. If you'd asked the people who were already setting up home security cameras if they'd like phone alerts, I'm sure they'd have said yes.

HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago

> Some of these features probably lead actual usage This is an interesting comment and from my experience I'm sure it's often true. Around 2008 or thereabouts I was the lead engineer on my company's first foray into what is now called IIoT: Industrial Internet of Things. At the time we just called it Remote Monitoring. There was (is?) even an magazine by that name. We built large, complex medical instruments that required periodic servicing both by the customer and by our Field Engineers. Engineering's value proposition for the project to the Technical Support/Field Service group was that we could reduce the frequency of expensive and unscheduled field service callouts and provide considerably more debug information from an instrument when a customer called in with a problem. We should be able to reduce diagnosing an instrument failure from hours to minutes. And in the future, we'd probably be able to tell when a consumable part was due for replacement and schedule it ahead of time. It was a freaking battle uphill both ways in the snow to get them to accept that. All they wanted was a slightly faster version of the tool they already had which was already inadequate for the task. They couldn't actually stop us from implementing this, but there a a strong reluctance to the point of "well it sounds nice but I don't see how it would be helpful to us." Postmortem: Fast forward two years. The system is in the field. Tech support keeps telling us how they can't imagine that they were able to get along without it and keep asking for new features!

nitwit005 4y ago

Perhaps if you asked people randomly. If you'd asked the people who were already setting up home security cameras if they'd like phone alerts, I'm sure they'd have said yes.