In September, a brand held a smart home strategy conference in Beijing, screaming for the IOC product strategy that includes the three elements of “single product, integration, and opennessâ€. This brings the attention of the bell back to this "seemingly lively, but not warm" field.
In 2014, after Google acquired the thermostat company Nest, smart homes ushered in, including Haier, Midea, Changhong and other home appliance companies, ZTE, Huawei and other communications equipment companies, as well as Jingdong, Alibaba and other Internet companies have entered in different ways. In the smart home market, the startups that promote the concept of smart homes are also welcoming a wave of concentrated eruptions. Aowei Consulting also predicts that the overall output value of China's smart homes will exceed one trillion yuan in 2020, and it seems to be booming.
However, in the process of concept to landing, the response of smart home 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 fiery two years ago, the focus of smart home companies has cooled a lot. It is said that many companies have difficulties in financing and are being seen by capital.
What is the reason for the whole industry to enter a dead end? Where will the future go? When will the industry’s long-awaited “window†appear?
Control center, ecology is 0, single product is 1
Up to now, even if the giants in the smart home industry are like clouds, they still don't see the leader, and most of them are playing the ecological card and establishing a control center.
For example, the iOS10 has added the Homekit platform, and the iPhone has become the control center. Unfortunately, even if it carries all the ambitions of the Apple layout smart home ecology, there are few users. Xiaomi is also a lot of products of Mijia, such as cameras, light bulbs, routers, boxes, etc., and their connection centers are all mobile phones. Samsung regards the refrigerator as the center of life-like smart home. ZTE believes that smart cameras, routers and smart door locks have the possibility of becoming entry-level intelligent hardware products. In addition, they also have smart home clients, which can be managed and coordinated. All products inside the system: socket, camera, electric light, TV, etc., the client becomes another control center (such as Apple's "family", ZTE smart home APP, etc.).
However, practice has proved that connectors, entrances, control centers, and ecology are all built on top of a single product. There are no extreme items, and others are empty talk. There are five reasons:
1, heavy ecological light single product is the end of the original. The significance of the smart home platform is to connect more products. The amount of products on the platform depends on the user's choice. Therefore, in the construction of the platform, users are the core factor. And the product is the most important chip for manufacturers to win users. As the saying goes, "When the high-rise building is flat," if the platform is regarded as a high-rise building, then the single product is the flat land.
2, simply use the individual hardware as the entrance to the smart home, contrary to the user experience. For example, when a user is cooking or relaxing in the kitchen, it is impossible to hold the phone in his hand anytime and anywhere. TV is also the center of entertainment smart homes. After all, TV is only in standby when people need it. Only those items that have high frequency, can be connected at any time, and are extremely easy to operate can take on the responsibility of the entrance, but "possible" does not mean "will be."
3. Most people misread the relationship between ecology and product experience. The reason why domestic Internet companies pay too much attention to ecology is because they are not good at making products, but only concerned with the user's data. They just collect data in the ecological guise, once they put all the data exchanges into the cloud, they The result is a decline in user experience, such as delays, failure to disconnect the network, and so on.
4. The biggest problem at present is still the scarcity of good products. Although there are endless products on the market, there are few good products. The product can't keep users, after the fresh period, the user can easily discard the so-called smart home products, and the platform is only a mirage if there is no product in the product and the product with poor user experience.
5, the future trend does not care about the control center, the development of the Internet of Things technology is followed by M2M (Machine-to-Machine), which means that devices exchange information with each other, which means that as long as the product and sensor are enough users, Through the operation and setting of the mobile APP, if artificial intelligence and Machine Learning are added, the future of the Internet of Things is to remove the mobile phone and decentralize, forming a high-level intelligence in the true sense of the Internet of Everything. So those who lack core products, rely on data, and only emphasize the powerful function of APP is contrary to IOT.
Therefore, focusing on a single product is not the only thing that needs to be done. ZTE's Xiaoxing looks at the smart camera. If there is no million-level sales, then ZTE's smart home dream is really just a dream. If the household products in Xiaomi's ecology can't be sold, the Xiaomi mobile phone will be a smart shelf and can't be a connector or a remote control.
Explosives create points, integration can form a face
Companies that value the importance of a single product are beginning to experiment with explosion strategies. For example, Xiaomi carefully designs a single product (or small package) and uses a low threshold to attract a large number of users, thereby generating massive amounts of data and attracting users to generate secondary transmission or consumption. . But in fact, the single product is a point-to-point competition model that followed the original industrial era. In the future, it will become more and more difficult to simply do the connection-free and unrelated explosions and form a system model. The future needs to be integrated. because:
1. The future is the chain-to-chain, ecological-ecological competition. Although a single product can be “explodedâ€, it will inevitably result in a single product and less relevance to other products, which makes it difficult for users to bring A system-level smart home experience. And if you expand the product line, because different products are mostly made by different teams (even different companies), it will lead to shortcomings in the interconnection of system layers.
2, single product is difficult to solve the problem of interest distribution, smart home ecosystem chain involves many stakeholders, including upstream chip and software vendors, network equipment manufacturers, platform providers, retailers, service providers (such as cable TV, communication or security companies, etc. and big data cloud providers, the needs of each relevant supplier are different. If you bet on a single product, it is difficult to coordinate the interests of the overall system, but only fully integrate and redistribute benefits. The party may be balanced.
3. The future profit model is no longer dependent on single items. In the future, the “hardware + service†model will become the dominant, which means that the sale of smart hardware is only the starting point, and the follow-up service is the protagonist. This includes embedding APP applications, building home portals, collecting big data, and looking for data. And traffic is realized and so on. In this mode, hardware is not the realization point of profit, but the basic link and carrier of the value chain, and the latter is the competition of integration ability.
Besides, no company can guarantee that all of its items will become explosive. Therefore, even Xiaomi is also attracting partners through investment and shareholding. These eco-chain enterprises are “small†millet that is cultivated in strict accordance with the millet model investment. At present, there are more than 50 “small†mills, involving a variety of use scenarios, home appliances with air conditioners, air purifiers, water purifiers, security products with smart cameras, and more Functional gateway, door and window sensor, health products have sphygmomanometer, weight scale, millet bracelet, the market performance is very dazzling. ZTE's integration idea is also to cultivate more partners through investment incubation, and promote the healthy development of the entire smart home industry. Thus complete the single product to open, open to integration, and then to the closed loop of the single product.
Their integration is to get rid of the excessive dependence on explosive products, quickly achieve coverage from point to point, and form influence and competitiveness in the industry, but integration still needs to pay attention to some issues, such as who helps install? How to land after the sale? In addition, the biggest problem in the smart home industry is that the product scene is not enough. The integration needs to support the complete IOT application, such as: from home to community, from the community to the Internet of the car and the use of the scene, which is precisely the practice of integration.
The lack of interoperability standards is a table, and a bad experience is the source of all evils.
When it comes to integration, some people will say that the reason for the difficulty of integration is that the industry lacks interactive standards. Indeed, every manufacturer in the smart home industry currently has its own ideas, and products cannot be interconnected, but Bell believes that “a bad experience is the root of all evil†is the real reason behind it. because:
1. People don't have a cold for smart homes. They are naturally uncomfortable with their own. They don't care if there are any standards. At present, the intelligent hype phenomenon of smart home products is frequent; the form is larger than the content, which does not match the user's demand, and the high cost leads to the price being high and the market acceptance is low. The joint survey data of Aowei Cloud Network (AVC) and Tencent Appliances shows that users are currently interested in smart homes up to 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 stay on the networked collaboration (that is, interoperability) of home devices, but should enhance people's life experience in all aspects. Smart home people need practicality, not remote control, nor a cool control interface. It is efficient, convenient and energy-saving. The ideal smart home is to book a flight for us to change the flight, or automatically adjust the air conditioner to the right temperature according to our body temperature. In the future, smart homes need to automatically sense the environment and people, self-learning and self-adjustment.
3, the lack of interactive standards is actually because the layout is not perfect and done in a closed way, hurting the user experience. For example, Xiaomi chose to use closure to ensure the user experience, but in the case of imperfect layout, the result would be counterproductive; after Samsung acquired SmartThings, it required to purchase its SmartThinsg hub to enjoy its technology. But this closed smart home system, once not ready, became a "kidnapped" user.
Therefore, Ali is an open platform for cloud Internet of Things, and Baidu Cloud has also launched dulife for wearable devices. In addition, Apple's HomeKit, Amazon's echo, Haier's U+, Midea's M-Smart, Huawei's HiLink, etc. are also open to the banner, but they are mostly internal coordination, certain technical strength and industry call for success in the future. The force and cooperation model, that is, the openness is good.
Smart homes still have a golden triangle: hardware, cloud services and smart terminals. The hardware is Machine, the app on the smart terminal is the human-machine interface, the control hub, and the cloud is the center of connection, data and service. Only open can completely release these capabilities, improve and enhance the user experience. Interoperability standards will come to fruition.
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