The Internet is eroding the traditional world bit by bit. Computers, mobile phones, TVs, cars, now it's the home's turn.
Last year, Alibaba and Midea announced a strategic cooperation to build an open IoT platform based on Alibaba Cloud Computing and released the first IoT smart air conditioner. Previously, Baidu took a stake in the smart home company Haimo Technology, and its core product was home smart remote control products. The WeChat Partner Conference showed the use of WeChat to remotely control air conditioners and TVs. In addition to the active deployment of giants like BAT to the "home", Xiaomi is trying to control the router, an information hub, to control the home. Some entrepreneurs have entered the home from the dimensions of controllers, remote control boards, and sockets.
Internet players have penetrated into every traditional industry as a catfish, promoting the latter to revolutionize itself more drastically.
Change from customer thinking to user thinking
Smart home is not a new concept. As early as before the Internet, there were smart buildings, smart security, and smart buildings. The world's first smart building can be traced back to the United States in 1984, and smart homes have also been widely used for many years, including China.
The emergence of the Internet of Things is a watershed. With the help of mobile communication technology, the device can connect to the Internet by loading a SIM card, or via WIFI or Bluetooth. The M2M (MachinetoMachine) connection between objects makes more applications possible. Ericsson predicts that in 2020, there will be 50 billion devices connected online, dozens of times the stock of smart phones. A large part of it comes from home-related equipment, such as three meters (water, electricity, gas), home appliances, security, parking lots, elevators, lights, heating, and so on.
The previous Internet of Things applications and individual users are transparent to each other. Individual users are completely unaware of the convenience of the Internet of Things. In the past, smart homes were dominated by remote control of lighting, remote control of electrical appliances, and control of electric curtains. This is more an industry solution, and the direct customers are enterprises or governments, rather than families and individuals.
Enterprise customers consider economic benefits, use SIM to transmit meter readings to reduce meter readers, and save electricity through smart light control. Now that smart homes have entered the "user era", users pay for products, and user-oriented thinking requires functions, cost, experience, and marketing to go hand in hand. This is where Internet companies excel.
Home appliance companies become the vanguard of Internet home furnishings
The first to bear the brunt is home appliances, which have explored the Internet of Things in the past few years and are now beginning to make changes.
The most typical is an air conditioner, which has a built-in SIM card and sensors, and uploads the temperature, humidity, and switch status to the cloud. Air conditioner manufacturers can track equipment usage at any time for remote troubleshooting, analysis and prevention. Since most air conditioners require lifetime maintenance, remote troubleshooting will greatly reduce after-sales costs. Since 2013, Midea has applied IoT intelligent technology to all new inverter air conditioners, making all air conditioners a networked intelligent terminal device.
Consumers did not know this before, and now the home appliance industry has decided to let intelligent functions directly benefit users.
Haier established the Hailifang Maker Platform and Haiji Community last year to encourage and support the innovation of smart home appliances. Changhong, located in Sichuan, vigorously promotes the concept of "home internet", advocating the intelligentization and interconnection of all devices at home. However, home appliance companies are not good at software and lack knowledge of the Internet. Their various explorations have not caused big waves.
The cooperation model between Ali and Midea belongs to the Internet of Things Home Furnishing. The open platform of Ali's Internet of Things is the cloud, and Midea's air-conditioning is the end. Connect home appliances through the network and cloud computing. Users can now remotely control the air conditioner through the App, and in the future, home appliances can automatically sense the environment and people, learn and adjust themselves, just like Nest. A typical example is that the smart air conditioner is connected to the bed. The bed senses human body temperature, heat dissipation and perspiration, and adjusts the temperature, humidity, and switch, so that people will always be in the most comfortable environment while saving electricity.
This is completely different from the traditional smart home with a card. The Internet of Things home is always online, and the home equipment is highly intelligent through cloud computing and big data processing. Internet companies can also combine their own businesses with smart homes, such as e-commerce, social networking, and so on. The Internet of Things home is actually the Internet home, which will redefine the smart home industry.
Open ecology is the only way out
Nest, which was acquired by Google for US$3.2 billion, has self-developed apps and hardware. Most domestic smart homes fall into this category. The design and production of hardware, App development, and cloud services are all done by themselves or outsourced. For example, smart air conditioners from Midea, Haier and Gree.
Smart phones have two major models, vertical integration represented by Apple and an open alliance ecosystem represented by Android. Smart home is moving from Apple model to Andorid model.
Traditional manufacturing companies are looking for integration points with the Internet. In the past, the home appliance industry valued Internet e-commerce channels. Now they are beginning to use Internet technology and capabilities to explore brand-new products and business models. Midea's cooperation with Ali and Nest's choice of Google is enough to show that smart home equipment vendors are closely integrating with the Internet, or even into one.
There is a golden triangle in smart hardware technology: hardware, cloud services, and smart terminals. The hardware is Machine, the App on the smart terminal is the man-machine interface and control hub, and the cloud is the center of connection, data and services.
In this golden triangle, traditional home appliance manufacturers are good at hardware, while Internet players have the advantage of cloud services and smart terminals. They understand users better, apps better, and the Internet better, and they are better at cloud technology, including data storage, computing, and mining capabilities.
Through OHA (Open Handheld Device Alliance), Google wins over manufacturers in all links of the industry chain to achieve the prosperity of the Android ecosystem. The smart home industry is also waiting for such alliances and leaders corresponding to Google to appear.
Android will not appear in smart homes
Google's unified smart terminal relies on Android. Does the smart home need a new operating system?
The main function of white goods is to reduce work intensity and make life more comfortable, and information interaction is an auxiliary function. Home appliances themselves only need the most basic information input and output. Under cost constraints, home appliances, especially small appliances, cannot have the computing resources of CPU, memory, storage, and I/O that match smart phones. As for other household items such as curtains, door locks, switches, sockets, and kitchen utensils, it is even less likely to have computing power.
In the end, we will return to the "Golden Triangle": smart terminals (mobile phones, tablets, wearable devices, TVs, PCs) are responsible for control and interaction, the cloud is responsible for computing, storage, and connection, and home appliances (homes) are responsible for the essential work (laundry, freezing, Temperature adjustment, boiling water, etc.), collect data through sensors, return data through communication modules, and receive remote commands to achieve intelligence.
This means that smart home appliances other than TVs do not need and are difficult to run an independent smart operating system. The operating system is essentially the interface between humans and machines, and the interface between humans and smart homes is smart terminal + cloud, and the operating system of smart terminals has been ruled by Android and iOS.
Who will become the Google of smart homes?
Although there will not be an operating system corresponding to Android, smart homes still lack something that dominates the world: platform access protocols and application protocol standards. Based on unified protocols and standards, household equipment manufacturers open interfaces, and application developers develop applications based on interfaces. There is no barrier between manufacturers, and developers' applications can be adapted to similar devices of any brand. Developers are the foundation of any intelligent ecological prosperity, which has been proven from Windows to iOS to Android.
Now, home appliance companies, Internet giants and entrepreneurs all hope to lead such protocols or standards.
On the same day that Midea and Ali cooperated, Haier held a conference on U+, an operating system for smart home appliances. Earlier, Midea announced the construction of an operating system for smart home appliances. At the beginning of the year, Samsung and LG also demonstrated smart home appliance operating platforms. Taking LG as an example, the future of home appliance products will focus on a "HomeChat" intelligent platform for development, which allows users to manage connected home appliances through SMS.
The common feature of these platforms is that they are provided by hardware vendors, each provide cloud services, and each establish access protocols and application protocols. This is the Apple model.
Ali is another way of thinking to be an open platform for the cloud Internet of Things. Different from vendors' own standards and agreements, the positioning of third-party platforms allows Ali to bridge the gap between vendors. In terms of technical capabilities, it has stronger cloud computing and big data capabilities than home appliance manufacturers. According to its open platform design for the Internet of Things, it can support the access of billions of devices in the future, and provide dozens of petabytes (1PB=1024TB) of data storage, computing and mining capabilities.
App developers access its cloud platform, and hardware vendors access its cloud platform, just as smart phones use Android. This is similar to Ali's approach to forming the SmartTV Alliance. The positioning of the open platform of the Internet of Things enables it to support home appliances, wearable devices, smart car equipment, medical and health equipment, smart toys, etc. in addition to home appliances. This is in line with Ali's data strategy, and also in line with Ma Yun's recent cloud strategy of "end-driven cloud, cloud-enriched end".
Ali is not the only company with such ambitions. Baidu Cloud has also launched a similar platform for wearable devices like **fe.
In the end, who can succeed, the key lies in the competition of technical strength, industry appeal and cooperation model. Alibaba Cloud and Baidu Cloud are the two powerhouses of China's cloud computing. Alibaba Cloud is moving faster on the smart hardware cloud. Needless to say, e-commerce channels are attractive to hardware vendors. Big data processing capabilities are also one of the best in China, and it also has its appeal among hardware vendors.
How long is the smart home outbreak?
The premise for the emergence of Google in the smart home industry is that smart homes will explode and become popular. There are two different voices for this.
Conservatives believe that smart homes are smart for the sake of intelligence. People do not need home appliances to be smart. Remote control of air conditioners, refrigerators, and automatic cooking breakfast are pseudo-needs. Manufacturers are just using "smart" gimmicks to better sell products, cost Is the biggest limit.
Optimists believe that Moore's Law is also applicable to the smart home industry, and the cost of smartness is rapidly decreasing. After the emergence of an open ecosystem, traditional hardware manufacturers, Internet giants, system integrators, and third-party developers have created rich applications around the ecosystem to tap and meet user needs. After the user's habits are cultivated, they will gradually accept, favor and rely on smart homes, just like the development path of the iPhone, from dispensable intelligence to indispensable. In this process, more business models will appear, such as big data models, Internet giant subsidy models, etc., to share the cost of intelligence.
Smart home makes human life better. The comfort and convenience it brings may surpass our imagination. Jobs reinvented the mobile phone. Smart home will eventually reinvent "home" and bring a new lifestyle. Internet giants have advantages in technology research and development, economic capabilities, and resource integration. After joining the smart home industry, they have brought the tipping point to come early.
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