'The Internet of Things is like the Cloud 8 years ago' ... Boss of Dell's new IoT biz spills beans Dell has created a new "Internet of Things" division, and launched its first product: a $500 gateway designed for industry. "The Internet of Things is like the Cloud was eight years ago," the division's executive director Andy Rhodes told El Reg. What, overhyped? Ambiguous? An obscene cash bandwagon? "There is a lot of buzz," …
"Very useful when you get back to the hotel late at night after a long day and can't get into your room because your phone died."
Didn't you get the memo? Smartphones are soon going to be a one stop shop for just about every service and activity you could possibly do! Banking, shopping, taxis, transport, doors, driving your car, feeding the cat, etc etc because smartphones are like so totally hip and kool. Or something.
Which I'm sure is all great for the kids - except as you say if your phone has died or been stolen or you've broken it or lost it or left it in your jacket in the office or you've forgotten the password or its been hacked and so on. Because unfortunately these hipster marketing types don't seem to understand the meaning of the phrases "backup plan" and "if it ain't broke...".
So, you now have all this local processing power, storage, and RAM. So, praytell, why for any of the states iOt uses, should I send ANY information to a 3rd party? Even the "useful" 5% of it? Tenancy-based temperature control, the thermostat alone should have enough processing power I think... but this multi-ghz "gateway" definitely has way more than needed. Ligthing control? 3rd parties don't need access, and this doesn't take processing power either. Remote camera viewing (which has been done for a decade or more with IP cameras and DVRs, btw...), "plug and play" port forwarding, NAT punching, and manual port forwarding will ALL allow this with no 3rd-party access.
Oh, you WANT all that juicy info? Well, too bad, I've got no candy for you 8-)
You're entirely right.
Unfortunately, fools make up 95% of the tech market.
This is one bandwagon that is NOT stopping anytime soon and, like blood in the water, the marketing sharks are already in a frenzy. The bonuses will be staggering.
And when the brown matter really starts hitting the revolving blades, they will safely retreat behind the old "but we didn't design the thing !" excuse, keeping their bonuses.
Doesn't matter. This is one game I'll be watching from the bleachers.
Or even not at all.
We know there's no real answer to "why IoT" except that it fills column inches.
But why try to repurpose a thin client box? Maybe Wyse and Dell have some kind of legacy agreement where Dell are contractually obliged to spend $Xmillion/year with Wyse, and they haven't found a way to spend it, and this is the latest and most visible candidate?
As others have noted, a half decent SoHo router would be more than capable of doing this job for a quarter of the cost (or less). It would have the usual SoHo-gear problem of instant obsolence, but does that matter much here?
So Dell decide to act all Novell and bring something totally out of proportion to the marketplace?
The insanity of companies not understanding IoT is mind blowing. You'd have thought we've seen this type of change happen so often, that it would be easier to work out what will happen?
For internet of things, think hardware equivalent of a class and an instance. Old school had a device which was a class. New school has IoT, which is your instance. It needs to be stupid cheap and does everything as virtually as it can. These will be like RFID's with enough processing power to do Docker.
The hardware will become so cheap it will be disposable. The clever money will be being able to take the data and do something new with it. Microsoft are already there with its various service bus options. IoT will be about messaging and big data processing. Who bought an R specialist recently?
Dell should focus on building nice looking ultra light laptops and damn good data centre servers because the rest of the market is going to disappear - in about 8 years!
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