Thanks! I’ll read this more closely tonight but I already see some things there I’m going to inject into a talk I’m giving next week.
So, the IoT industry will be 50% larger than today’s global automotive industry by 2022? Seems… optimistic, or they’re just lumping “anything with a radio or wired connection other than power” as “IoT”.
Well, if all automobiles become Internet connected by 2022 (and I suspect nearly all will by then) then doesn’t it make sense that the IoT industry will be larger than the automobile industry if that is counted as a subset? (I have not read the article yet…)
@ ianlee74 - It appears to me that that’s exactly what they’ve done. Still, it’s disingenuous; the tire industry doesn’t claim to be a $9bn industry just because cars use tires…
It’s worth noting that these numbers come from Cisco, who may or may not have a financial interest in driving infrastructure buildup and communications technology in general.
[quote=“godefroi”]
@ ianlee74 - It appears to me that that’s exactly what they’ve done. Still, it’s disingenuous; the tire industry doesn’t claim to be a $9bn industry just because cars use tires…[/quote]
I’m not sure I’d call it disingenuous because once you attach the Internet to a car it does become part of the “IoT”. Attaching tires to a car does not make a car a tire. However, it definitely does suggest that there is a lot of “new” growth that isn’t really as new as they’d like us to think.
Cars usually have radios; does the audio electronics industry count the price of cars in the size of the audio electronics market?
Not the price of a car. The number of new cars on the road is important to them however. (Used to hold Sirius XM shares and follow them closely)
Again, adding a radio to a car does not make a car a radio. Adding the Internet to a “thing” (car), does make it an “IoT” device. I agree, totally wonky way of counting but perhaps semantically correct. Perhaps if you were adding up “radio enclosures” then you could add up the price of the car 
Speaking of cars and IoT. After looking at the most active IoT investors from that report. Found this little gem:
Looks interesting. Have to check the quote.
I don’t know about other insurance companies, but mine at least gives different rates for different monthly mileages. I don’t know how it would stack up against a straight per-mile rate, though.
It is possible that it is overoptimistic:
Actually, I believe that robots will become the default Internet thing. They are the most useful thing that you would want connected to the internet. This however could lead to the I,Robot situation, so I have mixed feelings about it.
In my (only an) opinion, the frantic drive to connect everything to the internet is mostly a data grab by people who wish to sell it to advertisers. While there is a use in connecting some things to the internet (say, my thermostat), there isn’t a use (to me) in sending all the data it might gather to someone like Google. They, on the other hand, would love to know when it might be profitable to show me an advertisement for a blanket…
@ godefroi - While I would agree that marketing and consumerism in general is out of control, I see IoT as a kind of two edged sword. We need IoT to minimize resource waste, improve our decision making ability and to make decisions for us when conditions change faster then we can think or react. Certainly IoT will change our business models as vendors become obsolete and we enter the age of partnerships. The problem with this is we start to operate and live on a razors edge of optimization, efficiency and reliance and while this is great when it works, the problem is when we fall off that edge as its a long fall and climbing back onto that edge is painful and messy, but IoT is happening and will continue to grow but some of the estimates are completely glue sniffing bogus. During one of my presentations I talk about the scale of IoT and while the huge numbers tend to make people’s eyes get all starry I have to remind them of the cost per device and how this overall number hasn’t really ever changed over the ages. For example when Mainframes ruled the earth, there wasn’t many of them, but the cost per unit was huge, and ever since then the numbers of personal computers, devices etc have been going up, but the price per unit has been going down as well so the total value number hasn’t changed as much as people think, so it becomes a bit of a reality check. Yes IoT is the next thing and right now is about positioning, I liken it to a surfing competition where everyone is jockeying for position so they can catch the biggest part of the biggest wave and ride it for maximum points, but also important is they prevent their competitor from possibly riding it for even more points, so positioning is huge right now. Microsoft could have easily owned this already, but in true Microsoft fashion, they didn’t realize what exactly what they had or what it meant in terms of the future (they really do miss Bill Gates).
Microsoft a couple of years ago reminded me of IBM and their Watson Research Lab or perhaps more famously Xerox and PARC (both fumbled the future badly), but they have pockets of the company which were awake and thinking and other groups are starting to wake up as well, and frankly Ballmer left Satya a company that was ready to rock, but Steve had to go as Microsoft needed a bit of a image change to really sell its awakening, of course Steve as the largest individual shareholder of Microsoft will benefit nicely from all of this, but he is a happy man with his Basketball team (I’ve always like Steve as the guy has a wicked sense of humour and really did/does care about Microsoft and developers).
@ Duke Nukem - Before we get too far into the billg hero-worship, let’s not forget how he completely failed to see the internet coming.