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Very curious decision by Nest (and by parenting, Google) to not only exit the Revolv business, but brick the devices and apps with less than 60 days notice. It's an indicator of what could be a coming problem: reliance on a cloud IoT implementation that suddenly disappears.
It's funny, in the early going Thread was labeled as the "ZigBee killer". Revolv never released the ZigBee update. There must have been a lot more work to move the Revolv implementation into Works With Nest compatibility than anticipated.
Many firms still look at IoT as a large, growing, (and therefore very attractive) market. The reality is it's a collection of small verticals, some growing, some actually shrinking, all of which are fiercely competitive, and there simply isn't enough profit in any given vertical to satisfy any of the large tech companies. When the current tech boom inevitably turns bust, I think IoT will be seen as one of the larger examples of hubris that seized the industry.
There's that "hubris" word that Tesla invoked this week. There is a sense of we're-engineers-and-you're-not on the IoT, with technology searching for a wider-appealing use case.
Thinking more about this ... Revolv may have very well been a case of exit planning, building a device hoping to get acquired. Google may have had a knee-jerk reaction to Samsung's SmartThings acquisition.
This is why you pay industry experts for acquisition due diligence, folks (shameless self-plug goes here).
It's not just IoT, this also applies to anything interacting with the Internet. For example, since YouTube changed their API in March last year, many older "Smart" TVs (and home cinemas, and DVRs, and...) can no longer access it because the manufacturers can't be bothered to update their software/firmware for "obsolete" devices (i.e anything more than a year old) -- and it's nobody's responsibility to fix it, even though services like YouTube may be one of the reasons people bought their "Smart" TV in the first place.
In this case the problem is the software/firmware on the device rather than a service in the cloud, but the end effect is the same -- something which should have a useful life of many years becomes obsolete far sooner.
It's not just IoT, this also applies to anything interacting with the Internet. For example, since YouTube changed their API in March last year, many older "Smart" TVs (and home cinemas, and DVRs, and...) can no longer access it because the manufacturers can't be bothered to update their software/firmware for "obsolete" devices (i.e anything more than a year old) -- and it's nobody's responsibility to fix it, even though services like YouTube may be one of the reasons people bought their "Smart" TV in the first place.
In this case the problem is the software/firmware on the device rather than a service in the cloud, but the end effect is the same -- something which should have a useful life of many years becomes obsolete far sooner.
Good point - in the rush to produce Internet-enabled products in a shifting landscape, we may be sending a message that, at least on the consumer front, these are unreliable toys and that it might be best to wait a few years before making serious investments. Which isn't good for those hoping to make bundles of money.
So, this will make people look for IoT solutions that do not use cloud services. It might be that people are not yet thinking about this risk. But I'm sure people will start asking more questions before they buy. I am reminded a bit of the pre-internet days when you would buy hardware, and if you lost the manual you would not have the info to reset or configure it. Also there are many examples of services that people have paid to use that went away. Maybe this is not really a new problem, it just looks like one. If the box were free and you only paid for the service, then the service going away would probably not smart so badly.
What this really points to is the need for a clearly defined revenue model for products. Are they services or are they devices? Right now what is on the market runs the gamut. Like Fitbit, Trace Snow, your cell phone, your home security system, etc.
