Wake me up when the Internet of Things is over

BACK in 2013, fashionable people started wearing glasses with a small but inevitably conspicuous built-in heads-up display and camera. These fashionistas were unusually distracted even for a distracted age – losing the threads of conversation, staring off into space, tilting their heads in odd ways, muttering strange commands (“Take a picture”, “record a video”) and every now and again reciting impressive, if irrelevant, lists of facts magicked up from the pages of Wikipedia. The glasses were called “Google Glass”, the unfortunate creatures who wore them “Glass Explorers”. The “Glass Explorers” were soon dubbed “Glassholes”, the fad faded and the glasses are no longer available.

Is the Internet of Things (IoT) a more prolonged Google Glass experiment – a cumbersome way of addressing a non-problem? Over the past 20 years, companies have poured billions of dollars into the IoT. Consultancies gush in glossy reports about a wonderful future in which dumb objects are infused with intelligence – umbrella handles that glow when it is about to rain, pillboxes that yelp when you forget take your meds, intelligent ovens that produce a perfect roast, tennis rackets that feed data to your smartphone which then tells you how to improve your serve.

The hype continues. A new report from the management consultancy McKinsey and Co estimates that “the total value potential for the IoT ecosystem could reach US$12.6 trillion by 2030”. Fusion Strategy, a new book by Vijay Govindarajan of Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth University and Venkat Venkatraman of Questrom School of Business at Boston University predicts that the fusion of “big iron and big data, steel and silicon” will produce nothing less than a fourth industrial revolution. But if the hype continues, so do the disappointments.