Future development direction of smart home system

In 2014, since Google acquired the thermostat company Nest, smart homes have ushered in an explosion, including home appliance companies such as Haier, Midea, and Changhong, communication equipment companies such as ZTE and Huawei, and Internet companies such as JD and Alibaba have all entered in different ways. In the smart home market, start-up companies that promote the concept of smart home have also ushered in a wave of concentrated eruptions, and they have been favored by venture capital funds. Aowei Consulting also predicts that the overall output value of China's smart homes will exceed one trillion yuan in 2020, which seems to be thriving.

However, in the process from concept to landing, the response of smart homes in the terminal consumer market is not very optimistic. So far, most of the market pioneers have become martyrs, and there are only a handful of products that consumers really recognize. Compared with the enthusiasm two years ago, the attention of smart home companies has cooled a lot. It is said that many companies have difficulties in financing and are looked down upon by capital. What caused the entire industry to enter a dead end? Where is the future? When will the long-awaited "outflow" of the industry appear?

Control center, ecology is 0, single product is 1

Up to now, even if the smart home industry is like a cloud, there are still no leaders, and most of them are playing ecological cards and establishing control centers.

For example, the Home kit platform is added to iOS10, and the iPhone has become the control center. Unfortunately, even if it carries all of Apple's ambitions for the smart home ecosystem, there are few users. So is Xiaomi. Many Mijia products, such as cameras, light bulbs, routers, boxes, etc., are connected to mobile phones. Samsung regards refrigerators as the center of smart homes for life, while ZTE believes that smart cameras, routers, and smart door locks have the possibility of becoming entry-level smart hardware products. In addition, they also have smart home clients that can be managed and coordinated in a unified manner. For all the products in the system: sockets, cameras, lights, TVs, etc., the client has become another control center (such as Apple's "Home", ZTE Smart Home APP, etc.).

However, practice has proved that: connectors, entrances, control centers, ecology, etc. are all built on single products, there is no ultimate single product, and the others are just empty talk. There are five reasons:

1. Focusing on ecology and despising single products is putting the cart before the horse. The significance of the smart home platform is to connect more products. The number of products on the platform depends on the user's choice. Therefore, in the construction of the platform, users are the most core factor. The product is the most important bargaining chip for manufacturers to win users. As the saying goes, "a huge building rises from the ground", if the platform is regarded as a tall building, then the single product is the flat ground.

2. Simply using individual hardware as the entrance to a smart home is contrary to user experience. For example, when a user is cooking in the kitchen or having fun, it is impossible to hold the mobile phone in his hand anytime and anywhere. TV is at best the center of entertainment smart home, after all, TV is only on standby when people need it. Only those single products that have high frequency, can be connected at any time, and are extremely easy to operate can bear the important task of importing, but "possible" does not mean "it will be."

3. Most people misunderstand the relationship between ecology and product experience. The reason why domestic Internet companies pay too much attention to ecology is that they are not good at making products, but only care about users’ data. They are only collecting data under the guise of ecology. Once all data exchanges are placed in the cloud, the The result is a decline in user experience, such as delays and inability to disconnect the Internet.

4. The biggest problem at present is still the scarcity of good products. Although there are endless products on the market, it is embarrassing that there are few good products. Products cannot retain users. After the freshness period, users can easily discard the so-called smart home products. If there are no products on the platform and products with poor user experience, it is just a mirage.

5. The future trend does not care about the control center. The Internet of Things technology is developed to the back of M2M (Machine-to-Machine), which means that devices communicate and exchange information independently with each other. This means that as long as there are enough products and sensors, there is no need for users. Operate and set up through the mobile phone APP, if coupled with artificial intelligence and machine learning, the future of the Internet of Things will be decentralized and decentralized, forming a real sense of advanced intelligence of the Internet of Everything. Therefore, those who lack core products and rely solely on data and only emphasize the powerful functions of APP run counter to IOT.

Therefore, focusing on single products is not just a single product that needs to be done right now. Xiaoxing, a subsidiary of ZTE, sees that if there is no million-level sales of smart cameras, then ZTE’s smart home dream is really just a dream. If the home furnishing products in the Xiaomi ecology cannot be sold, the smart phone of the Xiaomi mobile phone will be just a display, and it will not be a connector or a remote control.

Explosive products create points, integration can form a surface

Companies that pay attention to the importance of single products have begun to try explosive strategies. For example, Xiaomi carefully designed a single product (or small package) and used a low threshold to attract a large number of users, thereby generating massive amounts of data and attracting users to generate secondary dissemination or consumption. . But in fact, single products follow the point-to-point competition model of the original industrial era. In the future, it will be more and more difficult to simply make unconnected and unrelated explosions without forming a system model, and it will need to be integrated in the future. because:

1. The future is the competition between chain and ecology and ecology. Although a single product can be "exploded", it will inevitably lead to a single product and less relevance to other products. This will make it difficult to bring users System-level smart home experience. And if the product line is expanded, because different products are mostly made by different teams (or even different companies), it will lead to shortcomings in the interconnection and interaction of the system layer.

2. It is difficult for a single product to solve the problem of benefit distribution. The smart home ecological chain involves many stakeholders, including upstream chip and software suppliers, middle and downstream networked equipment manufacturers, platform providers, retailers, and service providers (such as cable TV, telecommunications or security companies, etc.) and big data cloud providers. The needs of each related provider are different. If you bet on a single product, it is difficult to coordinate the interests of the overall system, but only full integration and redistribution of benefits It is possible to achieve equilibrium.

3. The future profit model will no longer rely on single products. In the future where things are connected, the "hardware service" model will become dominant. This means that the sale of smart hardware is only the starting point, and subsequent services are the protagonist. This includes embedding APP applications, building home entrances, collecting big data, and looking for opportunities to integrate data with The flow is realized and so on. In this mode, hardware is not the point of profit realization, but the basic link and carrier of the value chain, while the latter is the competition of integration capabilities.

Besides, no company can guarantee that all of its single products will become explosive products. So even Xiaomi is attracting partners by investing in shares. These eco-chain companies are "small" millets that were incubated in strict accordance with the millet model. There are currently more than 50 companies involved in a variety of use scenarios. Home appliances include air conditioners, air purifiers, and water purifiers. Security products include smart cameras, and more. Functional gateways, door and window sensors, and health products such as blood pressure monitors, weight scales, and millet bracelets have dazzling market performance. ZTE's integration approach is to cultivate more partners through investment incubation, and stimulate the sound development of the entire smart home industry. So as to complete the single product to open, open to integration, and then to the closed loop of the single product.

Their integration hopes to get rid of excessive dependence on explosive products, quickly achieve coverage from point to surface, and form influence and competitiveness in the industry. However, integration still needs to pay attention to some issues, such as who will help install? How to land after sale? In addition, the biggest problem in the current smart home industry is that there are not enough product scenarios. Integration needs to support complete IOT applications, such as: from home to community, from community to Internet of Vehicles, intercommunication and scenario utilization. This is precisely the test of integration capabilities.

The lack of interoperability standards is the table, and the bad experience is the root of all evil

When it comes to integration, some people will say that the reason for the difficulty of integration is the lack of interactive standards in the industry. Indeed, each manufacturer in the smart home industry currently has its own ideas, and products cannot be interconnected, but the bell believes that "bad experience is the root of all evil" is the real reason behind it. because:

1. People who don't catch a cold on smart homes are essentially unhappy with their use, and they don't care whether there is a standard. At present, the intelligent hype phenomenon of smart home products is frequent; the form is larger than the content, and it does not match the needs of users. In addition, the high cost leads to false high prices and low market acceptance. Aowei Cloud Network (AVC) and Tencent Home Appliances joint survey data show that users are currently interested in smart homes as high as 95.2%, but 87.5% of users are dissatisfied with the current status of smart homes, indicating that they are completely inconsistent with expectations or lower than expected. expected.

2. The intelligentization of smart homes should not only stop at the networking and collaboration (that is, intercommunication) of home devices, but should improve people's life experience in an all-round way. What people need in smart homes is practicality, not remote control, nor a cool control interface. High efficiency, convenience, and energy saving are what users want. The ideal smart home is to book air tickets and change flights for us, or automatically adjust the air conditioner to a suitable temperature according to our body temperature. In the future, smart homes need to automatically sense the environment and people, learn and adjust themselves.

3. The lack of interactive standards is actually due to imperfect layout and closed methods, which hurts the user experience. For example, Xiaomi chose to use closure to ensure the user experience, but the result would be counterproductive if the layout is not perfect; after Samsung acquired Smart Things, it required the purchase of its Smart Thinsg hub in order to enjoy its technology. However, once this closed smart home system is not ready, it becomes a "kidnapping" user.

So Alibaba is an open platform for cloud IoT, and Baidu Cloud has also launched dulife for wearable devices. In addition, Apple’s Home Kit, Amazon’s echo, Haier’s U+, Midea’s M-Smart, Huawei’s HiLink, etc. are all under the banner of openness, but most of them are synergy within the system, which will have certain technical strength and industry success in the future. The appeal and cooperation model, that is, the open ability are good.

Smart homes still have a golden triangle: hardware, cloud services, and smart terminals. The hardware is the Machine, the App on the smart terminal is the human-machine interface and control hub, and the cloud is the center of connection, data and services. Only openness can fully release these capabilities, improve and enhance the user experience, and on top of this Interoperability standards will come naturally.

Look at marketing concepts in the short-term, and develop patented technologies in the long-term

Another important reason for the cooling of smart homes is the popularity of exaggeration. Many so-called "frontier technologies" are mostly just a propaganda concept. When the industry is full of various speculative behaviors that lack hard power and rely solely on marketing to make money, weak demand becomes a problem. As a natural result, "a rat shit broke a pot of soup" has also become the best description.

The basis of smart home is the application of technology, such as Internet of Things technology, information technology, digital technology, voice technology, sensor technology, etc. In the long run, the entire industry will be like the mobile phone industry, and there will inevitably be a process of shuffling. Companies that have no technical genes, are not technically hard, and rely on marketing hype will be the first to get out.

In addition to the aforementioned speculative companies, some companies are transforming into the smart home field, such as furniture companies, bathroom companies, door and window companies, and Internet companies. These are not technology-based companies, and the products themselves do not use many innovative technologies. The defects in their congenital and genes are fully exposed, and the degree of intelligence of their products can be imagined. In 2015, Xiaomi was troubled by patents. As the patents were not yet approved, they were hyped up by the public relations department, and then heavily fined by the industrial and commercial departments, which turned into a laughing stock for a while.

Ringing friend Li Junhui previously calculated the ranking of enterprise invention patent applications in 2015. Among companies involving smart homes, ZTE leads the patent list, and Huawei, Xiaomi, Qihoo, BOE, Gree and Lenovo have all entered the top 10. The accumulation of technology, patents, resources (funds) and talents of overseas Samsung and Apple is an irreplaceable advantage for other companies for a while. This undoubtedly proves an established fact: in the battle of smart home, only patented research and development technology is the core competitiveness. However, the patented R&D technology is not a temporary work, and the building is not built in a day.

So those companies that try to use thousands of dollars to apply for new utility patents to take advantage of the loopholes should stop early. Even if you are good at marketing and packaging with long sleeves, without technical patent support, relying on sporadic smart home products, the smart home you create will always be a castle in the sky.

It’s not that the time has come, but the safety is not done

Finally, let’s talk about the issue of safety. Many people in the industry attribute the fact that consumers do not buy it because they have not yet come to the forefront, but they did not reflect on whether their products are really good enough, especially for the lowest level of security considerations, which are consumer purchases. The first premise.

Not long ago, "New York Times" columnist Nick Bilton said that a malfunctioning Nest smart thermostat caused the temperature in his home to become very low. Earlier, there were news reports that a freshman wrote a mobile phone virus that caused hundreds of thousands of Android mobile phone users to be recruited. Almost all smart devices currently use the Linux-based Android system, which has many loopholes and poor security. Smart home companies basically have no security defense technology, which means that smart home systems are more likely to be attacked by hackers, which will cause smart door locks and indoor monitoring to fail. Thieves can enter your home as if they are in and out of their own home to take things, and A large number of potential dangers, such as stealing the content of indoor surveillance cameras, leading to the disclosure of user privacy, etc.

The recent explosion of Samsung NOTE7 that has fallen into a whirlpool of public opinion has given us a head start in making smart hardware products. No matter how good the concept and the powerful technology, security will always be the core and bottom-level requirement. It's a pity that most manufacturers now focus on the appearance or technology of smart homes, and put safety behind.

What is gratifying is that some smart home developers have realized that security needs to be emphasized at all levels in the field of Internet of Things, but there are still a few in the industry that can provide components and processes with sufficient security. Because it tests their ability not only to collect, organize, analyze, judge, predict, respond and adjust big data.

In short, in the past few years, on the one hand, we have seen the hot development momentum and prospects for the development of smart homes. But on the other hand, they have to face the bleak market situation of smart home products. When the industry bubble period has passed, all companies should settle down and do their products well, only then can they have capital to connect with more platforms and make products truly realize the "Internet of Everything", so that user accumulation is a natural thing, the so-called Integration and ecology are also the icing on the cake. Article link: China Security Exhibition Network http://www.afzhan.com/news/detail/49610.html